TFS & Jenkins & Chef, oh my: Part 3 - No more Jenkins?


  • Thoughtworks' GO is up and running - it is wonderful.  A bit of a learning curve when working with TFS (which is odd, haha or not), but the team seems to really like the concept so far.
  • We also sorted out the versioning question...or rather...the issue was handed back to us with 'we don't care about versioning, you deal with it'.  Okie dokie!
  • The config files themselves I think we'll just transform (somehow) at bundling time (turn the dev config file into env.web.config files), then delete extras upon Chef-ing and rename.   Or something.
  • About where to store the Chef configs - for now we'll just do local repo, but pretty sure we'll want a Git server
  • Confirmed with the dev team, shouldn't be a big deal to migrate to TFS 2013, as long as the client-side patches are in place (SP1 and a GDR patch for VS2010)

It's now simply down to working out the process, then manhandling tools to fit it.  A textbook CD implementation this is not, but in the least we'll have automated build & deploy, so that won't be a bottleneck any longer.

Also had some brainwaves around testing (if we can't have code-level tests, or QA-level tests...at least we can have Ops-level tests!) - simple stuff like:

  • ...do the files from the ZIP match the files in the DIR
  • ...is the port listening
  • ...curl the URL
  • ...is the Nagios passive IIS service still getting logs
  • ...is the Nagios HTTP monitor ok?
  • ...are the config files using the correct hostnames?
More to come...

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