Testing

Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems – LondonCD meetup June 2017

Posted on July 31, 2017July 31, 2017 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

This is part 3 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Applying the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery for new software is fairly straightforward (at least, until you deal with data and databases). However, existing “legacy” systems that were built without many automated tests and without much concern for repeatable deployments of discrete functionality pose a challenge for moving to Continuous Delivery.

Office Lens 20170612-205923

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Difficulties and Solutions for Continuous Delivery with Databases – LondonCD meetup June 2017

Posted on July 31, 2017July 31, 2017 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

This is part 2 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Continuous Delivery for web applications is (in 2017) largely a solved problem but where data and databases are concerned, Continuous Delivery becomes more difficult (I have written quite a bit about Continuous Delivery and Databases on the Redgate Simple Talk website – worth a read if you’re interested). In the meetup, we explored some of these challenges and some solutions to Continuous Delivery for databases. (Thanks to Alex Yates of DLM Consultants for his expertise in facilitating the discussion!)

Office Lens 20170612-210029

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Continuous Security in Continuous Delivery – LondonCD meetup June 2017

Posted on July 30, 2017July 31, 2017 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

This is part 1 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

How do we continuously address security concerns with modern software development? That was one of the questions we discussed and tried to answer at LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. “The yearly PEN test is dead!”, said one person, meaning that reliance on an infrequent, specialist test to address all security problems is simply not good enough any more.

Office Lens 20170612-201113

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Using Chef for infrastructure automation – reading list

Posted on August 28, 2014August 28, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I have recently read (and re-read) several books on Chef in order that I can recommend books to clients who are starting with infrastructure automation (and to remind myself of the more obscure uses of knife, encrypted databags, and so on). In this post I comment on these books:

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Matthias Marschall
Managing Windows Servers with Chef by John Ewart
Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (2nd Edition) by Stephen Nelson-Smith
Automation Through Chef Opscode by Navin Sabharwal and Manak Wadhwa

Summary: read Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook for a good introduction to Chef on both Linux and Windows; read Managing Windows Servers with Chef if you manage many Windows machines; but most of all read Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef because without a test-driven approach your infrastructure code will rapidly become tangled, unsupported, and obsolete.

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Roundup: Patterns for Performance and Operability

Posted on October 7, 2013October 7, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I recently posted a review of Patterns for Performance and Operability by Ford et al on the SoftwareOperability website. I think that this book is exceptionally useful in its treatment of both performance and operability, and anyone who cares about how well software works in Production should buy and read a copy (there are paper and eBook editions).