Dockerization Part 2: Deploying

Now that we have containers, we need to push them to our subprod environments so they can be tested. Bear with me, this is where things get a little complicated. Docker Setup Most people take the easy way out when they move to docker: they ship their containers to the cloud and let someone else manage the installation, upgrades, and maintenance on the docker hosts. We don’t do things the easy way around these parts, though, so we have our own server farm: a series of VMs in our datacenter. Continue reading

Dockerization Part 1: Building

I’ve been long overdue for a series of articles explaining how our current build system works. One of the major projects I was involved with before this recent reorg involved overhauling our manual build process into a shiny new CI/CD system that would take the code from commit to production in a regulated, automated fashion. As always, the reward for doing a good job is more work like that; when we decided to move to Docker to better support our new team structure, I ended up doing a lot of the foundational work on our new build-test-deliver pipeline. Continue reading

How to force Bamboo to build on Linux

So let’s talk about build servers for a minute. I manage the company’s Bamboo server, which we use to do builds and continuous integration. I don’t know if this is an unusual use case or what, but some of my builds require Windows and others perform best on Linux. So we have Windows agents and Linux agents. Some things you would think are intuitive are not. For example, there’s no way to differentiate in a Script Task between CMD and Bash. Continue reading