In a blog series about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CD), I described the process of CI and CD at a high level. In this blog, I will talk about the 5 pillars of Continuous Integration and the tools associated with these 5 pillars. I will explain how the interaction of these tools along with an Agile mindset will help you embark on a journey to continuously deliver value to your customers.
In the final instalment of this blog series, I will share some of my ideas that will help you in the journey towards Shift Left testing. I have used and applied these in various roles across my career.
In the previous blog, I covered the principles of Shift Left testing and also shared an overview about the test pyramid. Now, I will turn to a curated set of blogs and articles to address various problems with each test type described in the test pyramid.
Modern software products are being delivered as a service (SaaS) using cloud technologies. This secular move to cloud and SaaS has changed the way software is developed and deployed. SaaS products give you the means to deliver features and functionality to all your customers very quickly and very often. This also means that any quality issues or outages of your SaaS product will result in large number of unhappy customers. If you look at the root-cause analysis (RCA) of quality issues and defects, you will find that most bugs could have been caught during the design and coding stages. In order to meet the tough quality criteria for SaaS products, we need to test early and test often. This movement towards testing early is what is being called “Shift Left”.
Git is the most popular version control system and in this blog, I will be sharing some insights of using Git in a professional environment. I will review two branching strategies and share additional insights in connection with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment.
If you are a follower of this blog, you might have read about Using Docker with nginx and NodeJS. In this blog, I will discuss the code to build the two containers using Docker Compose. Finally, I will highlight an important capability of Docker that I learnt in this exercise. The source code being referred in this blog is available on GitHub.
The best way to learn a new technology is by doing some hands-on practice or exercise. In order to learn the basics of Docker, I was scouting for a problem and the one that captured my imagination was how to use Docker for handling static web pages and dynamic REST APIs. In this 2-part blog, I will describe the problem and the solution first and then show how I implemented the solution using Docker.
OpenStack Horizon is the project that provides the web based dashboard for OpenStack based clouds. In this 2-part blog I will show you how you can extend the dashboard. Customizing and extending is one of the most powerful capabilities in OpenStack and in private cloud environments it is common to add additional enhancements to address an organization’s needs.
OpenStack is based on the Python programming language and DevStack is the most common development and test environment for OpenStack. If you are doing serious, professional programming around OpenStack, it is very useful to have a proper development environment. In this blog, I will show you how to use the PyCharm IDE from Jetbrains for your OpenStack programming. I will use the Neutron ML2 driver code from my book OpenStack Networking Cookbook to guide you in setting up the PyCharm IDE.