The CI/CD and DevOps Blog

Jez Humble of Thoughtworks makes the case for continuous delivery -

• Continuous delivery makes releases routine, every day (even several times a day) occurrences -  for instance, Etsy says that a new engineer deploys on their very first day(even before they finish all their new employee paperwork).
• Deploying more frequently improves the stability of web services allowing companies toship code faster, to have fewer failed deployments and even if the deployment fails, to restore service faster.
• By automating the build-deploy-test-release process, continuous delivery lets teams perform these on-demand and both reduces the cost of development AND increases number of programs under development.

For more on how Etsy and Flickr implement continuous deployment, check out theengineering blogs for Etsy and Flickr.

GitHub announces new and improved ways to configure, customize, and debug webhooks.

A webhook is basically the way a GitHub repository "talks" to a web server whenever the repository is pushed to.

As the webhook guide explains - These “webhooks” can be used to update an external issue tracker, trigger CI builds, update a backup mirror, or even deploy to your production server.

Webhooks can now be configured directly as part of the repository settings (no API needed!).  And webhooks are now easier to debug and even re-send. Webhooks are already one of the most widely adapted GitHub integrations and now that they are even simpler to use, will surely continue to be so!

Greg Jorgensen of Typical Programmer posts his take on why software methodologies don't work.

As Greg explains -

My own experience, [...], is that software development projects succeed when the key people on the team share a common vision, what Brooks calls “conceptual integrity.” This doesn’t arise from any particular methodology, and can happen in the absence of anything resembling a process.

Common vision (AKA the way we do things around here) is perhaps especially important, when your goal is to move fast and break things. And what better time to start than when on boarding a new engineer?

As Facebook's Joel Seligstein puts it -

I would describe it as a way for us to educate our engineers not only on how we code and how we do our systems, but also how to culturally think about how to attack challenges and how to meet people.

And as we briefly touched on before - a successful dev culture encompasses the entire process - all the way to deployment. For instance, in an older post, Greg talks about how to develop code which is impossible to maintain -

A key part of developing unmaintainable code (as per Greg), is to create a super elaborate build and deployment structure. As he puts it -

Programmers can argue about simplicity and elegance in code, and then turn around and build the most elaborate and baroque build and deployment systems.

First off, a big thank you to all of those who attended the first Docker Meetup in Bangalore this past Sunday! It is amazing to witness the growth that Docker has experienced in the past few months. We at Shippable, are thrilled to be a part of the growth, and even more excited to integrate with Docker and help streamline the development process.

Grandiose aspirations aside, the event was a total success, with over 40+ Docker fans in attendance. Attendees came equipped with questions about Docker and the Shippable team, along with the dizzying amount of open source knowledge in the room, helped people solve their issues. Questions about basic Docker frameworks and migration across clouds using Docker were answered. Some folks even gave lightening talks on a Docker-related topic of their choosing.

Shippable is proud to be the organizer and host of the first Docker meetup in India on January 19, 2014 in Bengaluru India. Sign up for the meetup here.

We decided to Dockerize our software development workflow a few months ago, and we’ve never looked back since. We can develop faster, integrate faster, release faster. So much so, we also swapped out LXCs and started using Docker containers to run your build and test workloads on Shippable

Containerized software development is the future and it’s happening at Shippable. Come join us for a fun evening and share your Docker experiences with us.