4th Developers@CERN Forum

23 Oct 2017, 14:00 → 24 Oct 2017, 17:00 Europe/Zurich

Idea Square (CERN)

How do you push your application faster than the LHC?!

 

The Developers@CERN Forum is an event by developers, for developers, aimed at promoting knowledge and experience sharing.

This edition will take place during the afternoons of the 23rd and 24th of October. It will consist of a series of short presentations and workshops. The topic for this conference will be Application deployment, from 0 to Production.

Have you got an idea for a presentation or workshop? Then, tell us about it (deadline the 9th of October).

Registration will open in August. Please subscribe to developers-forum-announce@cern.ch mailing list for further information.

This event will be made by developers for developers. We are counting on your presence, but also on your contributions!

Developers@CERN Forum is an initiative of a group of developers targeting all software developers at CERN. It aims at building a community of developers to share knowledge and experiences. We plan to organise few events per year, each one having a different topic. To learn more about the initiative, read the CERN Announcements entry.

Organization

You can get in touch us at developers-forum-organizers@cern.ch.

Monday, 23 October

1 Welcome to the 4th Developers@CERN Forum!

Speaker: Luis Rodriguez Fernandez (CERN)

Recording

2 I made a website! Now what?

When you finish your website (or a web app) and you are ready to show it to the world, it's not the end of your work, it's just the beginning. Users will ask you to add new features, some bugs will be discovered or you will simply have to answer some emails about the website.

But before this happens, you need to put is somewhere, so people can see it and start using it. Now, how do you select which of the 1047 different hosting companies will be the best? Or where do you get a cheap domain? How do you know that your website is up and running when you don't look or how do you communicate with people who subscribed to your newsletter?

You don't know? Don't worry, during this talk I will give you some examples of tools and services that you can use when launching your website (with an emphasis on cheap/free and reliable tools).

Speaker: Sebastian Witowski (CERN)

Recording

Slides in the browser

Slides.pdf

3 OpenShift Workshop

Workshop to introduce developers to the OpenShift platform available at CERN. Several use cases will be shown, including deploying an existing application into OpenShift. We expect attendees to realize about OpenShift features and general architecture of the service.

Speakers: Alberto Rodriguez Peon (CERN), Mr Alvaro Gonzalez Alvarez (CERN)

introduction_to_Openshift.pdf

introduction_to_Openshift.pptx

Recording

15:45 Coffee break

4 New Webcast Website Development and Deployment

Over the past few months we've been migrating the webcast website from PHP to Python 3 and Openshift. We have it completely rewritten and we now use new deployment methods using CI and Gitlab.

Speaker: Rene Fernandez Sanchez (Universidad de Oviedo (ES))

Recording

Webcast Website Presentation.pdf

5 Refocusing your domain (until a better title)

This forum's subject is from 'Zero to Production'. But what exactly goes on during the 'zero' phase? What are the questions that you and your team ask yourselves before starting to code, and which are the first decisions you make?
'Apache or Nginx? Flask or Django? PostreSQL or MongoDB? Containers or VMs?', are usual questions that are brought forward during the design phase. Albeit cool and exciting, these issues are the wrong things to consider ourselves with during the first stages of software development.

What is the domain your application operates on? What are your core entities and how do they interract with each other on a logical level? Which are the business rules that would persist whether you would be creating a Web application, a Command Line Interface or simple drawings on a whiteboard? Not only should these issues be the first for a developer to consider but their importance should be clearly reflected in the application's code.

In 2012, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) proposed a layered software architecture pattern named 'The Clean Architecture' (https://8thlight.com/blog/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html). Built around the Dependency Inversion Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle), this pattern suggests a code structure that places the application domain (business entities & use cases) in its very core. It aims in achieving separation of concerns and produce software systems that are testable, adaptable and independent of external systems.

This talk will be a general presentation of the above architecture followed by a brief demonstration of the pattern (probably in Go).

Speaker: Mr Nikolaos Petros Triantafyllidis (CERN)

Recording

Refocusing your domain.pdf

Refocusing your domain.pptx

6 Change deployment in ServiceNow

The goal of this presentation is to show you something different from what you are used to see.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based PaaS¹ product with many out-of-the-box Saas² applications built-in. Customers routinely modify these applications or create their own on top of the platform. ServiceNow is used at CERN as the Organisation's Service Management tool.

In ServiceNow, everything is stored in its database; data such as support tickets, but also the application code, and even the database structure itself.

During this presentation, I will quickly develop a very small application and rapidly deploy it from our dev server into our qa server; then, develop and deploy an additional small change.

Along the way, you will discover how changes are recorded and deployed effortlessly. You will also see how conflicts are resolved. Hint: version control in ServiceNow is different.

(1) Platform as a Service
(2) Software as a Service

Speaker: David Martin Clavo (CERN)

Change Deployment in ServiceNow.pdf

Change Deployment in ServiceNow.pptx

Recording

Tuesday, 24 October

7 System testing software deployments using Docker and Kubernetes in gitlab CI: EOS + CTA use case

The IT Storage group at CERN develops the software responsible for archiving to tape the custodial copy of the physics data generated by the LHC experiments. This software is code named CTA - CERN Tape Archive.
It needs to be seamlessly integrated with EOS, which has become the de facto disk storage system at CERN.

CTA and EOS integration requires parallel development of features in both software that needs to be synchronized and systematically tested on a specific distributed development infrastructure for each commit in the code base.

This presentation describes the full gitlab continuous integration work flow that builds, tests, deploys and run system tests of the full software stack in docker containers on our specific kubernetes infrastructure.

Speaker: Julien Leduc (CERN)

Recording

8 If only Jenkins could scale

Jenkins is the most widely used continuous integration server today with a 70% market share (as reported in 2015 by ZeroTurnAround). Despite this success, Jenkins remains a difficult product to administer : First, Jenkins requires the installation of numerous plugins that sport conflicting dependencies and rely on evolving configuration parameters, making them hazardous to upgrade. Second, Jenkins does not provide any support to configure or migrate agent nodes collectively.
There are however numerous tools that can help with this task, ranging from the Jenkins Groovy command-line interface, to official Docker images and the new Jenkins Pipeline feature set.
We will present how such tools can be leveraged to deliver flexible and robust Jenkins infrastructures, letting deploy your applications to the cloud with confidence.

Speaker: Mr Pablo Gonzalez Jimenez (CERN)

Recording

Presentation If only Jenkins could scale - IT Developers Forum.pptx

URLs

• GitLab
• Jenkins Master
• Openstack

15:15 Coffee break

9 NXCALS - big data logging system - deployment & monitoring

In this talk I will present tools and flow that we use to make the deployment & monitoring of the system manageable.
Including:

• Git & Gitlab as VCS
• Gradle for artifacts building
• Ansible for deployment and automatic generation of environment specific documentation
• Jenkins with its DSL pipelines to govern the process of automatic softwaredelivery to various environments.

Apart from main deployment flow, following tools will be discussed:

• Monitoring the system using Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana.
• Log unification and browsing facilities with the ElasticSearch stack provided by IT.

Speaker: Wiktor Jan Jurasz (AGH University of Science and Technology (PL))

NXCALS - big data logging system - deployment and monitoring.pdf

Recording

10 How to easily offer your application as a self-service template by using OpenShift and GitLab-CI

In this talk, we will show how easily you can offer your application as a self-service template in OpenShift. Using this method,
your users can run and configure private instances of your application in only a few clicks, while you maintain full control on software
updates and central configuration of all instances, all this with almost no effort thanks to OpenShift and GitLab-CI.
To illustrate this with an example, we will showcase our experience running the Jenkins service at CERN.

Speaker: Alberto Rodriguez Peon (CERN)

Recording

selfservice.pdf

selfservice.pptx

11 .net core application lifecycle on Openshift

.net core application lifecycle on Openshift

I will show an example of a lifecycle of an OpenShift application with an emphasis on the continuous integration and deployment. The application compatible with .net Standard can be easily deployed on OpenShift using Source2Image functionality, which doesn't require developers to maintain docker images of the application. I will also present how to efficiently integrate this feature into GitLab pipelines with an automated deployment of the "review" environment, as one its parts.

Speaker: Wojciech Kulma (University of Vienna (AT))

net core application lifecycle on Openshift.pptx

Recording

12 Closing Remarks

Speaker: Luis Rodriguez Fernandez (CERN)

Recording

remarks.pptx