Designing and building a Large Scale CD system
2020-02-04, 14:00–14:50, D Aud

A look at designing a git driven CD system for software packages used to deploy software to 100s of thousands of nodes continuously


This talk will discuss the design and implementation of a bespoke Continuous Delivery system suitable for delivering packaged software to 100s of thousands of nodes in a developer driven git based deployment scenario.

We will discus:

  • What came before - twice yearly deploys and how that impact velocity and software
  • How a system was designed and built that can today support 10s of deploys a day as well as handling initial node provision continuously at scale and in many locations across the world.
  • We'll look at developer CLI tooling to interact with the CD system
  • Observability of the system for real time global view
  • Manageability of the system wrt things like circuit breakers and big red buttons to stop bad deployments
  • A contract based packaging approach that was used to embed in each package its configuration management and monitoring.

We'll look at the impact this had on software building practices, quality and team happiness.

A long term member of the DevOps community, architect and author of many tools in this space like Hiera, MCollective, Choria and major key features of CM systems like Puppet.

Enjoys creating automation tools capable of managing very large infrastructures within Enterprise secure networks.