Guidance for rolling out Fabric8 to development teams?

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Mike

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Sep 9, 2016, 1:24:37 PM9/9/16
to fabric8
First off, this is a really awesome set of technologies and DevOps capabilities.

With that, I would like to roll this out to development teams but I'm finding it hard to be able to locate a target installation that I can count on and reproduce across teams.

For example, we are all on Macs with the latest os and Java version and we deploy to AWS for Staging and Production.

Following the documentation has proved frustrating in that the various installation options may not work from day to day even with the 'DevOps version' set nor with a Vagrant file which should have an immutable installation but relies on variable resources which in turn break. I believe I've tried each of the different combinations for a number of the patch releases of Fabric8 over the last 6 weeks.

Are my expectation just too early?

Thanks in advance for your guidance. Also, let me know if there is some way I can help with this end-goal.

Thanks!

James Strachan

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Sep 9, 2016, 3:07:22 PM9/9/16
to Mike, fabric8
Hi Mike

On 9 September 2016 at 18:24, Mike <mrayar...@flyingraydesign.com> wrote:
First off, this is a really awesome set of technologies and DevOps capabilities.

With that, I would like to roll this out to development teams but I'm finding it hard to be able to locate a target installation that I can count on and reproduce across teams.

For example, we are all on Macs with the latest os and Java version and we deploy to AWS for Staging and Production.

Following the documentation has proved frustrating in that the various installation options may not work from day to day even with the 'DevOps version' set nor with a Vagrant file which should have an immutable installation but relies on variable resources which in turn break. I believe I've tried each of the different combinations for a number of the patch releases of Fabric8 over the last 6 weeks.

Are my expectation just too early?

We really want fabric8 to be rock solid and super simple to use. The unfortunate thing is that things are moving under our feet; there's lots of clouds, operating systems, virtualisation and permutations folks wanna try, docker and kubernetes moves fairly quickly & we're racing on top to provide awesome developer experience and features.  You're right though, its not totally awesome and solid all the time just yet. 

The hardest part is getting your kubernetes clusters setup and fabric8 on top of it; once thats done its generally pretty solid and vanilla kubernetes really. 


Do your developers want to run their own local clusters of kubernetes or do you envisage all developers talking to one or more kubernetes clusters on AWS?

For AWS our huge recommendation is to use stackpoint:

its really simple with stackpoint to spin up kubernetes clusters on AWS and then with gofabric8 its esay to spin up fabric8 on top of it.  We're hoping to get fabric8 integrated into the stackpoint setup too as a Solution; so its a couple of clicks and you're on your way.


Right now gofabric8 tends to use the latest versions of things; you can use exact versions of anything too if there's a regression (there's lots of different version flags - that are a little too confusing - we'd like to try unify them someone into one simple version string to note and change). https://github.com/fabric8io/fabric8/issues/6338

Also we'd like an easier way, once fabric8 is installed, of doing easy rolling upgrades of fabric8 as new features come out or bugs get fixed (with easy rollback if things don't work out). I'd love a little UI that informed the user of new releases being available and a button to upgrade (or later on rollback) to get new changes (kinda like the iOS AppStore). I'm hoping we can do this kinda thing with helm but its not quite there yet:
am hoping we can come up with something like this ASAP so that once you bootstrap fabric8 its easier to keep moving it forward (or back).


BTW if your developers like the idea of using a local kubernetes cluster for development (I particularly find it useful for the 'pre-commit' workflow before you are ready to push your changes into CI / CD), then our recommendation is to try minikube for kubernetes:

We're working on various things to make setting up a local developer box super simple. e.g. `gofabric8 install` will check gofabric8 is up to date and install any dependencies (like minikube + kubectl or minishift etc). We wanna make it super easy for folks to run stuff locally without really needing any knowledge of docker or kubernetes.

e.g. a few issues to show you the kind of thing:


If your developers do java; then I'm really hoping all they need to do is to setup fabric8 on their project:

  mvn io.fabric8:fabric8-maven-plugin:3.1.32:setup

then to build and run their app, type: 'mvn fabric8:run' and it'll figure out what to do for you and install gofabric8 and run gofabric8 start which will install + minikube/minishift + kubectl and create a local cluster etc.
e.g.


We should have a really slick user experience in the next couple of weeks for Mac folks doing development locally. Already stackpoint has a super slick experience for AWS; so I'm hoping thats a pretty reasonable start. 

I'm sure though we can keep iterating and improving to make things much simpler to get going, to understand whats gone wrong when things fail and to improve the UI and tooling to help developers get cloud native apps developed fast with CI / CD.

Though keep giving us feedback on whatever pain points you have; the more feedback we get, the more we can iterate and get better! Please keep us posted how you get on! 





 

Thanks in advance for your guidance. Also, let me know if there is some way I can help with this end-goal.

Thanks!

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James
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Twitter: @jstrachan
Email: james.s...@gmail.com
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Mike Ray

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Sep 9, 2016, 3:35:29 PM9/9/16
to James Strachan, fabric8
Thanks James!

Your work is very much appreciated!
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