A DevOps Workflow, Part 2: Continuous Integration

This series is a longform version of an internal talk I gave at a former company. It wasn't recorded. It has been mirrored here for posterity.

Look at you – all fancy with your consistent and easily-managed development environment. However, that's only half of the local development puzzle. Sure, now developers can no longer use "it works on my machine" as an excuse, but all that means is they know that something runs. Without validation, your artisanal ramen may be indistinguishable from burned spaghetti. This is where unit testing and continuous integration really prove their worth.

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A DevOps Workflow, Part 1: Local Development

This series is a longform version of an internal talk I gave at a former company. It wasn't recorded. It has been mirrored here for posterity.

How many times have you heard: "That's weird - it works on my machine?"

How often has a new employee's first task turned into a days-long effort, roping in several developers and revealing a surprising number of undocumented requirements, broken links and nondeterministic operations?

How often has a release gone south due to stovepiped knowledge, missing dependencies, and poor documentation?

In my experience, if you put a dollar into a swear jar whenever one of the above happened, plenty of people would be retiring early to spend time on their private islands. The fact that this situation exists is a huge problem.

What would an ideal solution look like? It should ensure consistency of environments, capture external dependencies, manage configuration, be self-documenting, allow for rapid iteration, and be as automated as possible. These features - the intersection of development and operations - make up the practice of DevOps. The solution shouldn't suck for your team - you need to maximize buy-in, and that can't be done when people need to fight container daemons and provisioning scripts every time they rebase to master.

In this series, I'll be walking through how we do DevOps at HumanGeo. Our strategy consists of three phases - local development, continuous integration, and deployment.

Please note that, while I mention specific technologies, I'm not stating that this is The One True Way™. We encourage our teams to experiment with new tools and methods, so this series presents a model that several teams have implemented with success, not official developer guidelines.

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