Status report and Milestones

[Peter Bengtson]

Just a little status report to tell you where we are and where we're going.

AWS

The Amazon AWS infrastructure is now fully in place and the subnet schema is complete. The whole AWS setup follows best practices in terms of security and scalability and should be very easy to work with.

Generality: Deployment and Testing

At the moment, I'm adapting the chef-repo and the deployment and testing procedure to fully support all configuration from data bags instead of hard-coded DNS names, email addresses and AWS keys in recipes. The fact that we're moving this out of recipes and into data bags requires a few changes, mainly having to do with testing under TeamCity, where Chef isn't doing the deployment to the test agents and thus can't install custom configuration files (config/*.yml, etc). 

Varnish

We're also working on implementing a ping function for Varnish — it doesn't have a built-in one — since Varnish now is deployed redundantly, and failover is handled by AWS Route 53. This also requires some changes.

The two above points shouldn't take more than a few days.

Redis

Once Varnish failover works as it should, we'll install Redis (for storing log info in massive quantities). This should be an absolute doddle.

TeamCity

Next, TeamCity needs to be configured properly and Test Agents to be created. We'll start with the Linux Test agents, so we can test the Core Back end Services (auth, cms, media, log, jobs). The only new aspect is that the TeamCity test agents need to have fake_dynamo running, as we're now started to integrate DynamoDB in Ocean. Eventually, SQL will be phased out of the Core Services in favour of DynamoDB and our OceanDynamo gem.
 

Back end Core Services

The next step is to install all Back end Core Services (auth, cms, media, log, jobs) and also the Sandbox Service. This will take at the very most a couple of days.

Front end Windows TeamCity Test Agents

Now that all back end services are up and running and are continuously tested and deployed, the front end webservers (webshop_client and admin_client) can be installed. This requires Chef recipes for TeamCity Test Agents for Windows to be written, as all front end client code is tested exhaustively on all target systems. Lasse Edlund and David Tatti will be taking a look at this (in fact, they already are). I'm sure they'll report how this task is progressing.

OceanFront

When the complete SOA is up and running, David Tatti has some work to do on the front end Javascript framework, OceanFront, to generalise it fully and to adapt it to the new environment.

OceanFront Documentation

Next, the process of documenting OceanFront will commence. David Tatti will in time, I'm sure, fill you in on how long this is expected to take.

General

Things are changing quite rapidly at the present stage. Therefore, you should pull from our repositories as often as you can - at least once a day - and integrate all changes into your codebase as soon as you can. In this way, you won't have to read through quite as many diffs and commit lists. It's an inevitable process at this stage.

[4lt4i]

Very good progress!

I have followed the growth of the infrastructure on the wiki and reaching a stage where foundation for running the framework is where the interesting part starts!

I will keep you posted on the progress of the FrontEnd TestAgents.