Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration
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IT organizations can enhance efficiency and cut costs by deploying containers to manage DevOps continuous integration (CI) infrastructure that is self-contained and autonomous.
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Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration
- 1. Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration Extending the concept of containers to continuous integration (CI) provides IT organizations with faster and more scalable ways to reduce the cost and maintenance of new digital infrastructure. Executive Summary As digital waves wash over the enterprise, IT organizations must embrace Agile and DevOps meth- odologies as competitive necessities rather than nice-to-have luxuries. Agile engineering practices are now mainstream, opening IT to the virtues of contin- uous integration (CI) and continuous delivery as ways to better deliver on the promise of distributed tech- nology stacks. Jenkins, one of the most widely used CI servers, requires the establishment of CI farms, deployed and managed in a master/multi-slave archi- tecture. CI aims to accelerate software deployment. However, the substantial time and effort that it takes to set up, maintain and onboard new projects into a Jenkins Build Farm and the inability of the CI farms to process the build loads can delay developer feed- back, thus negating CI’s important benefits. Emerging technologies such as containers (i.e., CI capabilities in a box) offer a viable solution to Jen- kins’ CI challenges. The ability to run Jenkins within containers enables optimizing the build infrastruc- ture and accelerating the CI process. This white paper analyzes the use of containers to provide self-contained and autonomous CI infra- structure that scales on demand through the use of the container platform and container management software like Docker and Kubernetes. Cognizant 20-20 Insights | October 2017 COGNIZANT 20-20 INSIGHTS
- 2. Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration | 2 CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION ECOSYSTEM CHALLENGES IT organizations seeking to set up a typical Jenkins-based CI ecosystem face the following challenges: • Low infrastructure utilization: The build infrastructure is typically suboptimal. For example, during release times, when there are huge spikes of development activities, multi- ple developers attempt to commit codes to an ill-equipped infrastructure, resulting in sub- standard performance. During the rest of the year, there may a lower load on the build sys- tems. Despite proper forecasting that is based on projected release volumes, these idle times are unavoidable. This results in low utilization of the build infrastructure and poor ROI. • Limited scalability of build infrastructure: Even with a CI system in place, the ecosystem is unable to scale to meet peak build loads; this is frustrating for developers who find their builds placed on queues. It often defeats the essence of DevOps where developer feedback needs to be instantaneous and continuous. This limited scalability necessitates advance forecasting and configuration of additional slaves while onboarding new projects. • Time-consuming setup and configuration: Setting up a Jenkins-based CI ecosystem involvesmultipleactivitiessuchasprovisioning the server-based specifications, configuring a secure connection between the Jenkins master and slave, and installing the necessary software and plug-ins. This process includes: providing access to various users; analyzing the suitability of templates for jobs and recre- ating them if necessary; testing the templates and plug-ins and establishing connectivity to the deployment environments from created nodes. It can take up to three to four weeks to set up a Jenkins Slave ecosystem and onboard a new application, which includes the time required for approvals and resolutions from enterprise IT and network teams. • Increased vulnerability due to un-versioned pipelines: Today, developers define build steps as configurable items inside the CI sys- tems. They must navigate through the Jenkins user interface to define these build steps. The build steps become fragile due to the inability of developers to control the versions of pipe- line changes, resulting in configuration drift and errors. USING CONTAINERS FOR FASTER AND EFFECTIVE CI The ability to run applications inside containers can be extended to continuous integration, where the CI server is run within the Docker container. This provides significant opportunities for opti- mizing the build infrastructure. Since containers are lightweight, they can be spawned on demand, depending on the build load for each developer. A container orchestration software like Kuber- netes or Apache Mesos can be used to manage the entire lifecycle of the containers within the CI server. We have developed a solution that takes this approach to provide developers with a CI infrastructure that scales on demand. Since containers are lightweight, they can be spawned on demand, depending on the build load for each developer.
- 3. Cognizant 20-20 Insights Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration | 3 Solution Overview The solution encompasses a central framework that listens to the developer commits that occur with the source code repository (SCR) that is monitored. The trigger is exerted when a commit happens to the repo and it invokes the frame- work endpoint configured as a web hook. The SCR passes the commit metadata through the payload to the framework. The framework pro- cesses the metadata into critical parameters for CI such as developer ID, commit ID, repo name and branch, along with other information. The framework also parses the pipeline file and maps the Docker images that must be pulled for this specific request. A Docker image specific to the application tech- nology that can be used for the build needs to be mapped. For instance, in order to build a J2EE application, a Docker image — along with the necessary build time dependencies of JDK and Maven — needs to be composed and built as a composite image. The framework pulls the image mentioned in the pipeline code from the Docker registry and applies it to the application build. The framework then initiates Kubernetes to pro- duce Docker containers based on a specific image with Jenkins, and prepares it for the CI. The appli- cation context is loaded into the Jenkins running inside the Docker, and the jobs are created along with the necessary pipeline components. Pipe- line jobs are executed inside the container, and the respective entities are passed between them within the pipeline. For instance, a typical pipeline may involve code checkout, application build, unit tests triggered and static code analysis, followed by archiving binaries to a repository. The pipeline can also be extended for test automation and environment provisioning. The only prerequisite is that the containers should be able to access the respec- tive DevOps tools and environments. Figure 1 offers a representation of how our solu- tion operates. A Container-Based CI Solution DEVELOPER Analyzes build reports SOLUTION FRAMEWORK Listens to the source control or UI using web hooks and triggers the solution automatically NEXUS/DTR Maintains repository of Docker images DEVELOPER Checks-in code Defines CD pipeline as YAML files GIT WEB HOOK PIPELINE EXECUTION AUTOMATED COMPILE BUILD ANALYZE PACKAGE ARCHIVE DEPLOY TEST LDAPSECURITY DOCKER Runs Jenkins as Containers DOCKER Runs Jenkins as Containers DOCKER Runs Jenkins as Containers KUBERNETES APPLICATION UI Visualizes the build steps and logs to analyze pipeline executions CONTAINER AND INFRA MANAGEMENT Enables Dockers to create containers to execute Jenkins Figure 1
- 4. Cognizant 20-20 Insights Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration | 4 Kubernetes confers the dual benefits of container orchestration as well as infrastructure abstrac- tion. Based on the volume of the build requests (or commits), a new instance of Docker is provisioned for each developer by granting an exclusive CI system. This becomes a powerful proposition making the build farms more scalable. The logs from Jenkins and associated plug-ins can be redirected to a log management stack like Elas- tic search, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) for more complex log analytics such as build analysis and real-time progress of the pipeline. Solution Benefits Initial deployments of our solution have resulted in the following benefits: • Optimized build infrastructure utilization: The abilities to spawn Jenkins containers on demand and tear them down upon execution ensure that the compute resources are opti- mized, thus leading to a better utilization of the build infrastructure. • Scalable build farms: The container-based autonomous CI ecosystem provides the capac- ity to scale up or scale down based on the load (i.e., code commits). This elastic nature of the CI ecosystem will ensure instant feedback once a commit is made to the repository. • Reduction of time to onboard new applica- tions into CI ecosystem: New applications can be brought into the CI ecosystem more quickly. The time needed for onboarding new projects is shortened by the “templatized” Docker build images, the pluggable Kuberne- tes slave that can accommodate new loads and the reusable pipeline as code modules that can be shared across projects. • Increases in developer productivity: Devel- opers do not need to wait in queues to receive feedback on builds. Pipeline as code provides significant convenience and productivity to developers enabling them to define CI configu- rations alongside code in the same repository. Based on the volume of the build requests (or commits), a new instance of Docker is provisioned for each developer by granting an exclusive CI system. This becomes a powerful proposition making the build farms more scalable.
- 5. Cognizant 20-20 Insights Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration | 5 Quick Take Large U.S.-Based Healthcare Outfit Containerizes CI We partnered with a leading U.S. healthcare solution provider to address challenges that were present in its build and CI processes. The company’s technology landscape had 456 applications built in Java technology that leveraged dedicated Jenkins-based nodes for CI. The enterprise wanted to achieve scalability of build infrastructure using containers and optimize its CI build investments. Based on the customer’s need and leveraging their existing Jenkins Master infrastructure, our solution was tailored to provide elastic build infrastructure that focused on spawning Jenkins slaves on demand using Kubernetes and Docker. The solution’s envisioned benefits include: • A 55% reduction in time to set up CI ecosystem. • More than 12x increase in infrastructure utilization. • Over 80% reduction in compute infrastructure. • A 40% reduction in infrastructure costs.
- 6. Karthikeyan Vedagiri Senior Manager, Cognizant’s DevOps Practice Karthikeyan Vedagiri is Senior Manager, Projects within Cogni- zant’s DevOps Practice where he focuses on the development of products and accelerators for Cognizant OneDevOps™. He has more than 13 years of experience in product engineering and quality assurance, and he specializes in design and architecture of test automation frameworks, deployment pipelines and DevOps platforms for emerging technologies such as cloud, container and platform as a service (PaaS). Karthikeyan can be reached at Karthikeyan.Vedagiri@cognizant.com. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Rangarajan Rajamani Senior Manager, Cognizant’s DevOps Practice Rangarajan Rajamani is Senior Manager, Business Develop- ment within Cognizant’s DevOps Practice. He has over 14 years of expertise in multiple industries such as global life sciences, manufacturing and construction, performing domain consult- ing, process consulting, presales and product evangelization. Rangarajan focuses on marketing and evangelizing digital technologies in areas such as IoT, cloud, service virtualization, functional QA automation and DevOps. He can be reached at Rangarajan.Rajamani@cognizant.com. Cognizant 20-20 Insights Using Containers to More Effectively Manage DevOps Continuous Integration | 6 LOOKING FORWARD Our solution can be enhanced further by con- necting it with enterprise bot channels. While the most natural way to trigger the solution is by means of source code repository web hooks, another way this can occur is via a simple web application or a bot configured to an enterprise chat channel. A bot-based trigger could blend the solution into the value proposition of conversa- tional DevOps, where the developers can trigger CI build manually through conversations with a bot inside an enterprise chat channel.
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