Comverge/Itron
Was hoping for a hoverboard—Back to the Future 2
Evangelizing DevOps Culture and Containerization.
The future looked bright. Was gonna be automation and hoverboards.
Deploy: Gnarly, tangled capistrano & chef-solo
Customers had their own VMs and typically three different environments. Every deploy was a new adventure.
CI: Jenkins, massive test suite 20 VMs & 8 hr builds
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Worked on a bunch of other deploys too, and never did get the big one properly untangled.
The big deploy win was developing a shared runbook and creating well groomed deploy accounts on a bastion host, instead of deploying from laptops.
Attempts to build better tests didn't provide results fast enough to get continued investment.
Improved to 70 VMs & 2-4hr builds and CI/CD automation
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Why is this so hard? Persistent denial—this stuff seems like just a bunch of minutia, tedious, but seems like it should be easy and keeps not being easy.
Also heard about Chaos Monkey and really wanted to live in that world.