As part of my job I evaluate many software and applications.
I need to have an environment that is easy to clean (so the previous apps are not bloating my system) and always light.
One idea is to create isolated environments (either by Docker or Virtual machines) and fire up a new environment every time I need to start over with new software to evaluate.
Questions:
1.Does Docker support this? Can I use it to create new environment every few days and test software in it?
2. If not, which VM system would be suitable for this particular need?
Thanks
This is exactly what all the Continuous Integration systems do: get fresh code, build your project and run tests inside the freshly created container. This is how clean testing is done nowadays. So Docker fits perfectly your needs.
Each fresh container is a clean environment where you can run your tests in. Then you can parse the result and remove the container, for example docker run --rm -it my-image ./tests.sh
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In my development environment, I have my IDE, a database, web-server... installed
A script exist: 80 different commands are ran for it.
Then, at delivery time (integration, acceptance), I have a big mess to execute a script that create many Docker containers, each having its goal: database, web-server, etc.
Their scripts are some subsets of the big one I'm using for my own local developer computer. But adapted.
It's very difficult to ensure the transition between my standalone - "flat" if I can say so - dev computer and the containerized version fitted for delivery.
I wonder if a way exists to develop directly an application being containerized at its early beginning :
With all the tree of its containers ready (and not a single one containing everything: it would be cheating...)
As soon as I compile my sources in my IDE : simple compilation would have for result binaries and files going in their due container
and it's in these containers that my application would be executed, even in development mode.
Is it possible? Is it already done by some of you?
Or does it have too much drawbacks to be attempted?
Should end to end tests be run at build time (running the application on the build server), or after deployment? I have not yet found a solid answer for which one is the standard.
Edit
I mean after deploying either to QA/SIT/UAT etc... vs. just running it on a build server without fully deploying it.
The whole point of having a build server is to create a single build of the current source code, of which you run tests and make sure that things work before you deploy them. I don't know why anyone would want to run tests after then have been deployed. What happens if you find a bug? You going to roll back the deployment? Always test before deployment.
Ideally, you would have a build environment that mimics your production environment that will allow you to run tests in a "deployed" environment. It's the reason that you have a development/staging/production servers.
I am a QA automation engineer and I am investigating docker as a potential way to run our tests.
Traditionally we have followed the git flow method where essentially where you have a dev and a master branch. Dev are constantly merging their new changes to the dev branch. When we wish to release, we will have a code cut off, where everything currently on the dev branch is deemed to be part of the next release. Script is then run to create the release candidate and this is deployed to staging. Any fixes that need to be done are made to the release branch and once ready to go to prod, new code is merged to master and deployed. Master is back merged to all branches so that everything is up to date. (described in more detail here: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/).
So my question is with docker do you need to have this workflow? Im thinking of maybe having a workflow like describe below:
Dev start working on a new feature.
Dev pulls master, creates feature branch - does his dev work - unit tests pass, dev is happy for work to go to QA
Dev runs script to create release candidate (which would involve pulling master again in case new code has been merged to master by another dev),
Docker then spins up a container with multiple containers inside that (front end app, DB instance etc)
Tests (unit, api, selenium integration etc) are then run against this release candidate and if good deploy to production.
So do I need a staging env in the traditional sense where it is constantly available?
I think you're conflating two things: a continuous integration environment and a staging environment. Docker does make it easy to bring up a fresh instance of your entire stack for continuous integration (see drone for a good example), but generally you still need a staging environment that is always available to test against before deploying to prod. This staging environment should be running the same docker images that eventually get deployed to prod.
I have read what the Docker is but having hard time finding of what are the real scenarios of using Docker?
It would be great to see here your usages.
I'm replicating production environment with it, on commit on project with jenkins after building binaries i deploy there, launch the required daemons and run integration tests, all in a very short time (a few seconds over the time that takes the integration tests). Having no need to boot, and little overhead on memory/cpu/disk is great for that kind of things.
I could extend that use for development (just adding a volume where the code resides to my git repository, at least for scripting languages) to have the production environment with the code im actually editing, at a fraction of what virtualbox would require.
Also needed to test how to integrate some 3rd party code into a production system that modified DB. Cloned the DB in a container, installed the production system in another, launched both and iterated the integration until i did it well, going back to zero to try again in seconds, and faster, cheaper and more scriptable than doing it with VMs+snapshots.
Also run several desktop browser instances on containers, with their own plugins, cookies, data storage and so on separated. The docker repository example for desktop integration is a good start for it, but planning to test subuser to extend this kind of usage.
I've used Docker to implement a virtualized build server which any user could ask to run a build off their personal git branch in our canonical environment.
Each SSH connection made to the server was connected to a new container, ensuring that all builds were isolated from each other (a major pain point in the past), ensuring that the container's state couldn't be corrupted (since changes were all isolated to that single instance), and ensuring that even developers on platforms such as Windows where Docker (and other tools in our canonical build environment) couldn't be run locally would be able to run builds.
We use it for the following uses:
We have a Jenkins Container which we can use to bring up our Jenkins server. We mount the workspace using volumes so we can migrate the server easily just by copying the files and launching the container somewhere else.
We use a Jetty container to easily deploy our war files in our production and development environment.
We use a whole host of other monitoring tools such as Uptime which we have containers for so that we can bring them up and down on various hosts with a single command.
I use docker to build and test our software on several different Linux distributions (RHEL 4/5/6/7, Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04).
Docker makes it easy and fast to create minimalistic and consistent build environments.
Docker gives you the benefits that other virtualization solutions give you to a fraction of the recourse needed.
I want to be able to automate Jenkins server installation using a script.
I want, given Jenkins release version and a list of {(plugin,version)}, to run a script that will deploy me a new jenkins server and start it using Jetty or Tomcat.
It sounds like a common thing to do (in need to replicate Jenkins master enviroment or create a clean one). Do you know what's the best practice in this case?
Searching Google only gives me examples of how to deploy products with Jenkins but I want to actually deploy Jenkins.
Thanks!
this may require some additional setup at the beginning but perhaps could save you time in the long run. You could use a product called puppet (puppetlabs.com) to automatically trigger the script when you want. I'm basically using that to trigger build outs of my development environments. As I find new things that need to be modified, I simply update my puppet modules and don't need to worry about what needs to be done to recreate the environments through testing for the next go round.