Ci/Cd on The IT Hollow

Quality Checking Infrastructure-as-Code

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 14:55:55 +0000

If you’ve been doing application development for long, having tools in place to check the health of your code is probably not a new concept. However, if you’re jumping into something like Cloud and you’ve been an infrastructure engineer, this may be a foreign concept to you. Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve started learning Git, JSON, YAML, APIs etc on top of your existing skill sets? Well, take some lessons from the application teams and you may well find that you’re improving your processes and reducing the technical debt and time to provision infrastructure as code resources as well.

vRealize Code Stream with Artifactory

Mon, 23 May 2016 14:04:37 +0000

vRealize Code Stream now comes pre-packaged with JFrog Artifactory which allows us to do some cool things while we’re testing and deploying new code. To begin this post, lets take a look at what an artifactory is and how we can use it.

An artifactory is a version control repository, typically used for binary objects like .jar files. You might already be thinking, how is this different from GIT? My Github account already has repos and does its own version control. True, but what if we don’t want to pull down an entire repo to do work? Maybe we only need a single file of a build or we want to be able to pull down different versions of the same file without creating branches, forks, additional repos or committing new code? This is where an artifactory service can really shine.

Using Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream

Mon, 09 May 2016 14:05:51 +0000

By now, we’re probably Jenkins experts. So lets see how we can use Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream. To give you a little background, vRealize Code Stream is a release automation solution that can be added to VMware’s vRealize Automation solution. It’s a nifty little tool that will let us deploy a server from blueprint, call some Jenkins jobs and deploy code from an artifactory repository. One of the best features is that you can build your release in stages and have gating rules between them so you can automate going from Development to UAT to Production or whatever else you can think of.

Use vRealize Automation with Jenkins

Mon, 02 May 2016 14:05:35 +0000

If you’ve been following the rest of this series about using Jenkins, you’re starting to see that there are a lot of capabilities that can be used to suit whatever use case you have for deploying and testing code. This post focuses on a great plugin that was recently pushed out by Kris Thieler (aka inkysea) and Paul Gifford. These guys have published a Jenkins Plugin for vRealize Automation.

Just like we’ve done in other posts, the first step is to install the plugin in the Manage Plugins section of Jenkins.

Push Code to GIT and test with Jenkins

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 14:26:57 +0000

in previous posts we discussed how you can use Jenkins to test various pieces of code including Powershell. Jenkins is a neat way to test your code and have a log of the successes and failures but let’s face it, you were probably testing your code as you were writing it anyway right? Well, what if you could push your code to GIT and have that code tested each time a GIT push was executed? Then you can have several people working on the same code and when the code gets updated in your repositories, it will be tested and logged. This makes it really nice to see when the code stopped working and who published the code to GIT. Now we’re really starting to see the power of this CI/CD stuff.

Getting Started with Jenkins Guide

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 14:00:28 +0000

Jenkins is a Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) tool that can be used to deploy code and test it based on a schedule, triggered by a commit in GIT or after other jobs have been completed. Jobs can all be kicked off manually.

The pages below might help you to get familiar with Jenkins and how it could be leveraged in an organization.

Jenkins Installation

Create Jenkins Project

Add Jenkins Nodes

Test PowerCLI Code

Commit Code to GIT to Trigger Job

Use vRealize Automation with Jenkins

Integrate Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream

Test PowerCLI Code with Jenkins

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 13:58:25 +0000

In the previous post we discuss how to setup a Windows Node to test PowerShell code. In this post, we’ll configure a new Jenkins project to test some very basic PowerCLI code.

To start, we need to have some basics setup on our Windows Node that we setup previously as a slave. In our case, we need to make sure that we have PowerCLI installed on the host. Let’s think about this logically for a second. Jenkins is going to tell our Windows node to execute some PowerCLI scripts as a test. If the Windows node doesn’t understand PowerCLI, then our tests just won’t work. I would suggest that you install PowerCLI on your Windows node and then do a quick test to make sure you can connect to your vCenter server.

Add a Jenkins Node for Windows Powershell

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 14:17:39 +0000

Not all of your Jenkins projects will consist of “Hello World” type routines. What if we want to run some PowerShell jobs? Or better yet, PowerCLI? Our Jenkins instance was built on CentOS and doesn’t run Windows PowerShell very well at all. Luckily for us, in situations like this, we can add additional Jenkins nodes and yes they can also be Windows hosts!

Create a Jenkins Project

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 14:15:00 +0000

In this post we’ll create a Jenkins project on our brand new shiny server that we just deployed. The project we create will be very simple but should show off the possibilities of using a Jenkins server to test your code.

To get started login to your Jenkins server at the http://jenkinsservername:8080 port and then click the “New Item” link. From there give your new project a name. In this example our project is a Freestyle project which will let us throw code right into the project and run it on the Jenkins server or subsequent Jenkins Nodes.

Jenkins Installation

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 14:32:04 +0000

Installing a Jenkins instance is pretty simple if you’re a Linux guy. But even if you’re not a Linux admin, this isn’t going to make you sweat too much. First, start by deploying yourself a Linux instance. The OS version in this post is based on CentOS 7 if you are interested in following along.

Once you’re up and running, make sure you can ping into the box and have SSH access. If you’re new to this, you can find instructions on setting up an SSH daemon here. Now that it’s setup we can install Jenkins by running the following commands.