Today, we are going to decode a visual. It represents the principle of continuous integration at AT Internet:

Continuous integration scheme
“Continuous integration at AT Internet”

The main principles of continuous integration

It is a set of practices designed to effectively deliver the software code produced by development teams. There are various objectives, including:

  • Limiting manual actions by automating builds, deliveries and other deployment operations. This limits the risk of human error and allows experts to focus on their product rather than continually investing time in repetitive operations that a machine can do for them.
  • The rapid availability of feedback offering a good visibility on the potential impacts of changes made to the existing code. Each member of the development teams can then calmly make changes to the existing code base and rely on the automation in place to inform them of the proper integration of their code into the product.

This concerns the continuous integration of new code, continuous delivery of deliverables and continuous deployment of products – but how do you link source code, deliverables and environments in the overall process? Here are some of the FAQs:

  • When I practice “promotion”, is it the promotion of my code? The promotion of deliverables? The promotion of the environment?
  • What is the link between the deployment in production and the master branch of code repository?
  • What automation can I implement to ensure consistency between the life of my code repository and that of my application, across different environments?

These questions may be answered differently depending on the technical or project context, the sector of activity or the level of maturity of the processes in the company. In this article, I will therefore try to describe the various concepts and principles, without creating dependency on a particular tool. Even if some tools can sometimes make life easier, it is more a question of the software delivery cycle, regardless of the means chosen for its implementation.

The “build once” concept

Build-once example
“Continuous integration: the build-once”

One of the key principles of continuous integration is “build once” or in other words, only build a new deliverable if the business code has been modified. This practice is intended to reduce the risk of building a different deliverable when deploying it in a new environment. Indeed, we find re-build practices all too often when delivering, thinking of obtaining an identical deliverable.

But there are still risks (sometimes significant) during this new build:

  • Machine problems (full disk, other…)
  • Network issues
  • Problem related to the build tool (in maintenance, unavailable)
  • Embed a different version of one of the dependencies of our product
  • Unintentionally rely on a different version of the code

We can therefore, without realizing it, and despite taking precautions, obtain a product different from the one that has successfully passed the various validation phases of our development cycle. All the benefits of the tests and verifications carried out are then lost.

The best way to avoid this risk is to build the deliverable only once and then use it as it is, during future deployments, for the validation phases and until final production – this is what is known as “build once”.

The promotion of deliverables

Promotion of deliverables example
“Continuous integration: promoting deliverables”

Now that we have our deliverable, we will want to subject it to a number of tests to be able to validate its production launch. We therefore need different “shelves” to store our deliverables in order to easily identify them according to their progress in the validation phases.

These “shelves” can take different forms depending on the technologies (deliverable managers, delivery folders, archiving of artefacts, storage of docker images, etc.) and their number depends on the chosen delivery cycle. Some companies will need more validation and integration phases than others, for reasons of compliance with certain standards, complex integrations etc.

At AT Internet, we have chosen to have 4 “shelves” to organize our deliverables (dev, integ, preprod, prod) and an additional one (staging) to allow the urgent delivery of bugfixes.

The passage from one deliverable from one shelf to another is conditioned by the proper conduct of different test and validation phases. If all the conditions are met, the deliverable can be moved to the next shelf: this is the promotion. Some will simply copy (rather than move); some tools directly expose methods for promoting the deliverables they host.

We then have an overview of the deliverables and their level of validation, simply by observing their place in the repository. The presence of a deliverable on one of the shelves also describes its character as a candidate for a given environment. It is this strong link that sometimes leads to the term “environment promotion”.

Internal environments

Internal environnement dev - example
“Continuous integration: environments and their tests”

Once these deliverables have been obtained and stored somewhere, they must undergo the various testing and validation steps to decide whether or not we can deliver them to production. It is then necessary to deploy each deliverable on the environment to which it is a candidate. It is the commissioning of the product, on a given environment, to perform dynamic tests. These tests are called “black box” tests, independent of the code or technology used for implementation.

Development: the first phase of deployment

Each deliverable is then deployed on the development environment and subjected to a first phase of testing. The first of these tests consists in validating the deployment mechanism. This is the first time we have tried to deploy this deliverable somewhere. The successful completion of the deployment is a first step to ensure that we are able to deliver the product to production.

We will then validate on this environment a number of properties of our system (functional or non-functional) but also the validity of some configurations of our deliverable. If everything is ok, then we can promote the deliverable and deploy it to the next environment for the integration phase.

Integration: validate all scenarios

In this phase, the system validated in isolation is brought into contact with the other systems of the software solution. It can then be used in the system integration testing phase, which aims to carry out business use cases that cross several systems in order to validate the correct connection of the various elements of the solution.

Each time the validation on the development environment is successful, this integration environment can be updated.

Pre-production: dress rehearsal

In pre-production, we carry out a final phase of tests before going into production, deploying only those features that we decide to go into production with the next release. This decision is not a necessary step and is often linked to a marketing or commercial decision.

In this environment, these are often receipt and acceptance operations, which are not intended to detect bugs in the product. If bugs are found at this stage, it is often a sign of a lack of testing in one of the previous steps.

If delivery in production is not linked to customer communication or support constraints, it is entirely possible to have only one “pre-production” environment, instead of integration and pre-production environments. We then accept the constraint (or advantage) that all the validated code goes straight into production if it successfully passes the following validation steps.

Staging

Staging makes it possible to validate a correction to be made quickly in production. The current production code will be deployed on this environment, with only the correction made as a modification, in order to validate the correct correction of the problem observed. The absence of side effects (regressions) of this product modification is also checked.

Production

Some tests of a different type can take place in production, often referred to as “Post-Deployment Tests”. It is rather a question of validating aspects related to the environment, specific configurations, monitoring systems or what I would call functional experiments (canary testing, A/B testing, feature flipping) etc….

At this stage, the objective is not to detect any bugs in one of the systems involved (even if this can happen!)

Delivery automation

Jenkins-delivery-automation

This orchestration of the delivery of a software product is intended to be systematic and repetitive. It is therefore normal to think about automating all this. Different tools are of course available to set up this orchestration (Jenkins, Travis CI, GitlabCI etc…) but the principles are independent of the choice of this tool. Beyond the essential steps of this automation (shown on the right on the image linked to the article), it seems important to me to highlight only a few details:

  • Publication: it is the deposit of the deliverable on one of the “shelves” for its future deployment on one of the environments. The shelf chosen depends on the code branch considered. Here are the identified publication paths:
    • Branch “develop” => deliverables candidates for the “development” environment
    • Release’ branch => candidate deliverables for the pre-production environment
    • Hotfix’ branch => deliverable candidates for the staging environment
    • Any other branch => no publication of the deliverable (it can still be retrieved if desired for testing)
  • The promotion step can be used to automate various operations. (some will prefer to keep control of these operations or integrate them into the next step: the deployment phase)
    • Integration promotion > pre-production
      • merge the code from “develop” to “release”
      • increment the minor version and reset the patch version to ‘0’ on ‘develop’.
    • Pre-production promotion > production
      • merge the release code to master
      • apply a tag on ‘master’.
    • Promotion staging > production
      • merge the code from “hotfix” to “master”
      • apply a tag on ‘master’.
  • At AT Internet, we use Jenkins and one question often comes up in the teams: should we orchestrate all this into one big job or into several separate jobs? The answer is somewhere in between and depends on your progress in implementing the different steps of continuous integration. However, some principles are important to consider:
    • The deployment of an existing deliverable must be possible at any time, regardless of the stages of construction of that deliverable.

The launch of certain tests on a given environment must be possible at any time, without depending on the stages of construction and promotion of deliverables.

Dis-continuous integration

Discontinuous integration example
“Discontinuous integration: manual actions in the flow”

The ideal flow that allows continuous delivery in production requires a certain number of automatisms and tools that are safety ramparts that allow products to be gradually validated until they are put into production. Some elements are often missing in the chain to give full responsibility to scripts and other test robots for the “decision” to deliver to production. Here is the order in which these elements are often put in place, in the evolution of R&D:

  1. Construction of the deliverable (build)
  2. Unit tests
  3. Deployment scripts
  4. Code quality
  5. Triggering of tests
  6. Promotional mechanisms

When one or more of these elements are missing, the operation remains manual. The rest of the operations are then also manually triggered, if automatisms are present to continue. We are then in a situation that I would describe as dis-continuous integration.

At a higher level of maturity, all operations are automated, but we are not yet ready to do without manual actions to trigger production releases. This is often the case if all the mechanics are available but the tests on the different environments are too limited. We still need to reassure ourselves with a few manual actions to “receive” and increase our level of confidence. Until the day when we can gladly realize that we are only intervening to trigger further operations, simply based on the status displayed by some systems. We can then link this operation to the rest of the chain because our action no longer brings any added value. Moving to this stage of continuous delivery also requires good production monitoring systems to be confident that the system will be resilient to a failure that has gone through the various validation steps without being detected. This may be the subject of a future article!

Author

With more than 10 years of experience in software testing strategy and implementation in an Agile environment, Alexandre is responsible for industrialising development at AT Internet. His daily challenge: guide our dev teams through implementing tools and methods with the aim of guaranteeing regular and high-quality deliveries to our customers.

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