Building sandcastles part 4: Azure

Continuing the adventures in continuous integration, I'm now looking into how services like AWS or Azure could really help dev teams along. A lot has been written about this before now, but while there seem to be lots of places talking about how easy AWS makes their dev / test / deploy cycle, I haven't seen too many places talking about all the components you might need.

So, looking at it from the ground up, we need, in the simplest terms:

• Somewhere to store our code
• Somewhere to build our code
• Somewhere to test our builds and artifacts
• Somewhere to host our final builds

This translates to:

• Some kind of SCM system
• Some kind of continuous integration system
• A private set of machines to deploy our applications to (let's assume that we're building a web application, so we'll need webserver and a database, minimum)
• A public set of machines to deploy the applications to

After mucking around with the trials of Azure and AWS, I decided to run a few experiments with Azure, and have ended up - so far - with meeting the first two requirements, with virtual machines running GitLab and TeamCity respectively.
I created a rather simple web application - no database yet, and pushed it up to GitLab, and then connected TeamCity over to that to run a couple of builds.

So far, so easy.

The next step - which feels like a pretty big one - is to build a test system. Now, it's very easy to set up a virtual machine, set up a webserver and then have a script to deploy the build artifacts from TeamCity over to it, but in an ideal world - where it's not just me working on it - it would be ncie to be a lot more flexible than that. What I really want to achieve is to be able to deploy a whole test environment with the click of a button.

That means that we need to start looking at the automated provisioning of virtual machines, because the last thing that anyone wants to do is set up a whole environment every time they want a build. Happily, there are a bunch of tools that can help us with this.

For a first experiment, I'm using Vagrant. It seems to be generally straightforward, and - in theory - relatively portable. It's been somewhat of a pain to get working with Azure, but now that it's running, I seem to be able to deploy machines relatively easily. Next steps are to actually get servers running on them.