The CI/CD and DevOps Blog

Companies today have realized the immense value of adopting DevOps principles in accelerating software releases. After all, whoever innovates fastest wins, and frequent software updates are key to faster innovation.

What is DevOps?

The term Devops was coined as a combination of DEVelopers and OPerationS. According to Wikipedia:

DevOps is a term used to refer to a set of practices that emphasize the collaboration and communication of both software developers and information technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

Every company today, regardless of industry, is under pressure to be great at developing and delivering software. This is because software is disrupting every type of business, from taxi services to food delivery to retail. Unless you transform your business and go through a digital transformation, your business is likely to die in the next few years.

Once you start this digital transformation, the next challenge is to innovate fast enough to survive and maybe win.  This is where DevOps comes in. Most companies have figured out how to accelerate software development through agile principles. However, the bottleneck is now software delivery. What is the point of producing code at a faster rate if you can't ship it out as quickly?

DevOps sets out to solve this problem by combining cultural change with end to end software delivery automation. The goal of DevOps is to ensure frequent, predictable, error-free software releases that helps you innovate faster.

A few days ago, we woke up to the sad news that the Thoughtworks team had decided to shut down Snap CI in August. We have the greatest respect for Thoughtworks and their mission and want to convey our best wishes to the team for their next adventure. 

If you're a current Snap CI customer, Shippable is a great fit as a replacement CI/CD platform. It is completely free to try us out and we are happy to offer help with migrating your CI configuration to Shippable. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

How Shippable compares to other CI/CD providers

Please read CI/CD and DevOps expert Yegor Bugayengo's blog ranking of CI providers where he ranks Shippable as the top platform. Shippable is also ranked first among all hosted CI providers on Slant.co.

While these rankings focus on CI, Shippable also provides value beyond CI by offering a complete platform for DevOps workflows, including deploying a versioned package into a series of environments, release management, approval workflows, etc.

Ever since we added Continuous Delivery pipelines to Shippable, one of the most common feature requests has been around support for deployment to the open source container orchestration platform from Google: Kubernetes. And we're excited to announce that we've added this last week! We already support Amazon ECS, Google Container Engine (GKE), Joyent Triton, and Docker Cloud/Datacenter and with Kubernetes added to this list, you can now automate deployments to any major Container Service using Shippable.

Amazon provides a hosted Container Service for Docker called EC2 Container Service (ECS) as part of its container focused suite of services. Many of our customers seem to love the ECR (EC2 Container Registry) and ECS combination to store and run their applications. Amazon ECS can be accessed by going to your AWS Management Console, selecting EC2 Container Service from the list of Services. 

In part I of this series, I demonstrated a simple scenario where we built and pushed a Docker image to ECR as part of the CI build workflow. In this blog post, I will show how you can set up deployment of the same sample application into Amazon ECS, In the last part of this series, I'll show how you can complete your Continuous Delivery pipeline with deployment into subsequent environments, promotion workflows between environments, and release management.

If you want to follow along with the step by step tutorial you can fork our sample, sign in to Shippable, and set up the CI/CD workflow as described. 

Amazon provides a hosted private registry for Docker images called EC2 Container Registry (ECR) as part of its container focused suite of services. Many of our customers seem to love the ECR and ECS (EC2 Container Service) combination to store and run their applications. Amazon ECR can be accessed by going to your AWS Management Console, selecting EC2 Container Service, and clicking on Repositories in the left sidebar. 

In this blog post, I will go through a simple scenario with a sample project where we enable a project for CI, build a docker image as part of the workflow, test the image, and then push it to Amazon ECR. In the next blog, we will then set up the rest of the Continuous Delivery pipeline for the sample application.

If you want to follow along with the step by step tutorial you can fork the sample used in this tutorial, sign in to Shippable, and set up the CI/CD workflow as described.