Over past few weeks I’ve been working on doing some integration and testing work to try and deliver a prototype system. I’ve taken the Vagrant tool and puppet to try and deliver systems for testing and development. Although the systems that I am currently working with aren’t fully automated, they are automated enough for them to be easily started up by a developer who reads the documentation (I hope).
I’m hoping that by providing these disposable systems that the various members in the team that I am working with will be more free to experiment and less fearful of breaking the system. At best everyone will take the idea on board and run with it as it does provide a common environment for all members in the team and it encourages reproducibility of issues and features.
One of the next steps of building up the development framework that I now have is to introduce some of these concepts and the whole Vagrant environment to the more front facing part of the team who need to deal with stakeholders in the project. If our requirements and policy team have constant up to date access to our development, testing and QA environment along with the executable specifications (in the form of cucumber tests) I hope to push forward communications between the stakeholders and the team that I’m working with.
For now I have one VM for the application itself and a number of “clusters” of VM’s which I had used for reviewing some technical documentation, they are partially automated for others to play with. Currently these scripts are internal to the project only, but it’s not hard to setup if you know how to configure puppet. Some of the scripts and ideas can be found at tchpc-vagrant, they’re not great, but not bad either. I need more of the developers in the team to use what I’ve setup to evolve the system more for our use.
In parallel to using this for my day job, I’ve also setup a Vagrantfile for one of my pet projects cports. Using Vagrant for testing builds and deployments of a packaging system has been great. I’ve been able to do clean rebuilds of various packages without fear of completely polluting the enviroment, as its just a few commands away from being redeployed and provisioned. I’ll need to play more and then release it to the HPC community (or those that care).