Chapter 5. Ever-Ready to Deploy Using Continuous Delivery

Thanks to the Continuous Integration setup we examined in the previous chapter, we now have a way of continuously producing deployable artifacts from our source code.

Our next goal will be to upgrade the pipeline from a Continuous Integration to an Integration plus Delivery one. To illustrate, we are in the middle of a three stage workflow:

That is to say, following a successful Integration run, we trigger the Delivery stage that will do the following:

• Launch a vanilla EC2 instance

• Apply configuration management to it:

  • Install the demo-app RPM we produced

  • Install other required packages to turn it into a web server

• Test the applied configuration (using Serverspec)

• Produce an AMI out of the configured instance (using Packer)

• Launch an EC2 instance from the produced AMI

• Run additional tests against the new EC2 instance

This pipeline will ensure that the application RPM installs correctly, our configuration management gets applied as expected...