Under the Hood – A story of CD Implementation with CloudBees CD

Overview:

In this talk, we will take a look “under the hood” at a real-world CloudBees CD installation that SPK and Associates did in 2021.  To do this, we’ll show the good, the bad and the ugly in an effort to educate others on what to look for in their own CI/CD implementations.

The first stage of this engagement was a discovery, which afforded the SPK team some major surprises, including understanding existing deployment tasks, software involved, and diagrams.  This is where many surprises and some of the “bad and ugly” come from for this story.

The next stages of this engagement talk about how engineers collaborated to implement proper technical practices, CloudBees CD, and other tools to help automate manual tasks, and reduce time to deploy from about 10 days to about 10 minutes.  This work allowed many teams to develop a culture of communication, trust and reliance on each other and the systems they all created collaboratively. 

At the end of the engagement, SPK and Associates provided a roadmap of how to engage other teams in this journey of simple deployment, including training which allowed them to manage their system themselves.

Objectives:

• How to approach starting a CI/CD pipeline implementation.
• An example of an existing, manual software deployment.
• Ways to minimize manual steps.
• How training is an important part of this engagement so this client could code their own pipeline moving forward.