TL;DR

A quick update on the work we’re doing in the CODE-RADE to bring a continuous delivery capability to the applications which can run on our infrastructure. A workflow to test the delivery of applicaitons in CVMFS needs to be implemented and it better be automated .

The problem at hand

So, we’ve gone to quite a significant length to develop a platform which allows almost anyone to contribute applications to the ROC’s repository. By sending a pull request or a commit directly to a repo in [https://github.com/SouthAfricaDigitalScience] – but what happens when an application is built ?

Applications are “delivered” to the sites via CVMFS ¹ .

We need it to be checked against itself, but also run from the CVMFS repo to make sure that when it gets out into the “wild” - on the sites that mount the repo and execute the applications. One of the reasons we chose CVMFS as a delivery mechanism was to give the site administrators less overhead in managing applications.

Basic Workflow

The part of the workflow representing testing and integration shown in Figure 1 is the meat of the problem - how do you reliably test user-contributed applications before integrating them into a repository which will be used at all sites ? - but the issue still remains of actually getting the software into the repo . Let’s take a closer look at that…

Slightly more detailed workflow.

So, once we have concluded the workflow in Figure 1 , some orchestration has to happen :

1. On the build node:
   1. shift new artifacts into the CVMFS server
   2. unmount the dev repo
2. On the CVMFS server:
   1. Put cvmfs dev repo into transaction
   2. Run regression tests on the new code - this includes all of the functional tests of all of the existing applications, as well as the new application.
   3. If all pass, publish the new dev repo
3. On the build node:
   1. mount the dev repo
   2. run regression tests
4. Send a message that the new application has passed all tests

It is now time for a human to take over and pull the code into the production repo which is mounted on all the sites.

Unless I’m missing something obvious, this is the slightly more detailed workflow…. before you get all excited about publishing containers and all, Yoda has a message for you:

That will come, that will come. In the meantime, go listen to some rad music:

… till next time …

Footnotes and References

 Tagged with cvmfs  •  CODE-RADE  •  CVMFS