Tools like GoCD and TeamCity are excellent components of advanced Continuous Delivery deployment systems. They help us focus on deployment pipelines and the flow of changes, rather than "builds" or "environments". We can further enhance these tools by using frameworks like Rancher to manage GoCD and TeamCity as highly available, always-on deployment services. In this talk, we'll see how to use Rancher to run deployment pipeline tooling like GoCD and TeamCity, and how this lets us focus on the important parts of Continuous Delivery: getting changes to Production safely and rapidly.

1. Using Rancher for highly
available deployment services
with GoCD and TeamCity
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
@matthewpskelton / skeltonthatcher.com
Amsterdam Continuous Delivery meetup group
08 February 2017, Amsterdam, NL

2. Rancher + GoCD + TeamCity == 😍

3. Today
'Deployment Services'
Deployment orchestration with GoCD
Introduction to Rancher
Rancher: platform for deployment services
Live Demo!

4. Team-first digital transformation
30+ organisations
UK, EU, India, China
skeltonthatcher.com

6. Build & Release Engineering
Infrastructure Automation
Organisational 'Medicine'
Training and Mentoring

7. We're partners with…

8. DevOpsTopologies.com

9. About me
Matthew Skelton
@matthewpskelton
Co-founder at
Skelton Thatcher Consulting
skeltonthatcher.com

11. Using Rancher for highly
available deployment
services with GoCD and
TeamCity

12. Safer, more rapid changes
to software systems
(Business Agility)

13. Deployment services as
first-class, core capabilities
for modern software teams

14. use logging as a
channel/vector to
make distributed systems
more testable
Invest in
Build & Release Engineering

15. 'Deployment Services'

16. Minimum capabilities
•Version Control
•Build & Unit Test
•Packaging / artefact management
•Deployment & test orchestration
•Logging / metrics / dashboard

17. Minimum capabilities
•Version Control
•Build & Unit Test
•Packaging / artefact mgt
•Deployment & test orchestration
•Logging / metrics / dashboard

21. 2017: build & deployment
tooling is core/critical
infrastructure – it's the only
mechanism we use to make
changes to
Production systems

22. DZone 2017 Guide to
DevOps &
Continuous Delivery
https://dzone.com/guides/devops-
continuous-delivery-and-automation

23. Article: CD Anti-Patterns
1. "One-stop shop" tools
2. Hidden logging / errors
3. Environment-driven
4. Blurred terminology
Authors: Manuel Pais & Matthew Skelton

24. TSK, TSK.
BAD TOOLS!!!

25. One-stop-shop tools 

26. Compose tooling w/ APIs 

27. Logging exposed 

28. Logging exposed 

29. Environment-driven 

30. Activity-driven 

31. 'Partially successful' 

32. Deployment Orchestration
with GoCD

34. My experience
•Using GoCD since 2011
•(Used CruiseControl 2006-2011)
•100s of pipelines
•~200 build agents
•😍

35. However…
•GoCD is powerful
•With great power comes
responsibility some trickiness
•Forces you to really understand
your build & deployments
👍

38. Server + Agent model
Server
Build Agents Test Agents
Deployment Agents
Staging
Production

39. Value stream map
http://jeremie-martinez.com/2016/04/19/gocd-android/

40. Model the current activities
'Walking Skeleton' deployment pipeline
Helps to transform ways of working

41. Model the current activities

42. Model activities, not envs

43. Secure deployments
Use sensible
security
boundaries

44. GoCD encourages good
practices and approaches
for Continuous Delivery

45. Introduction to Rancher

46. "A Complete Platform for Running Containers"

47. Managing container
clusters is tricky
Rancher simplifies the
container 'fabric' lifecycle

50. Rancher Catalog

51. Custom Catalog !!! 

52. Rancher as a platform for
highly-available
deployment services

53. Goal: highly-available tools
•Survive host failures
•Auto-failover to healthy hosts
•Auto-scale-out under load
•Multi-zone availability

54. Bad old deployment services
•Single VM
•Manual installation
•Occasional backups (not tested)
•Sitting under a desk (aka random
AWS subscription)

55. Modern deployment services
•Either SaaS
or
•Containerised
•Built and managed as code
•Recreateable in minutes

56. Platform for HA deployment services
Rancher + Terraform + AWS

57. Blog post series
'Container Clustering with Rancher'
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/

58. HA at the Rancher level

59. HA at the EFS level

60. HA at the GoCD level (1x AZ)

61. HA at the GoCD level (2x AZ)

62. Rancher enables highly-
available build &
deployment services using
best-of-breed tools like
GoCD

63. Live Demo!

64. Demo
•Create HA Rancher platform with
Terraform
'cdams36'

65. Demo
•Spin up new GoCD agents via Rancher
'scale' setting

66. Demo
•Flexibility and power of GoCD 'value
stream map' view

67. Further material

68. Links
• GoCD: https://www.gocd.io/
• Rancher: http://rancher.com/
• Continuous Delivery with Windows & .NET by Matthew Skelton & Chris O'Dell
(O'Reilly, 2016): http://cdwithwindows.net/ (free download)
• Blog post series on High-Availability Rancher:
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/container-clustering-rancher-server-part-3-
aws-efs-mounts-using-rancher-nfs/
• DZone 2017 guide to Continuous Delivery:
https://dzone.com/guides/devops-continuous-delivery-and-automation

69. Containerised
Built and managed as code
Recreateable in minutes
Using Rancher for highly
available deployment services
with GoCD and TeamCity

70. thank you
Matthew Skelton & Rich Bosomworth
@matthewpskelton & @richbos
skeltonthatcher.com