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DSL at ScaleSource-Code Based Orchestration

Greg Maxey, Solutions Architect, Electric CloudLaurent Rochette, Professional Services Architect, Electric Cloud

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Agenda

• Introduction• State of the art before DSL• Onboarding at a MASSIVE scale with DSL

o Mini case study at Financial Services company• Works in progress and what's next with DSL

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Introduction

• Last year introduced the ElectricFlow DSL at DOES 2015o EVERYTHING you can do in the GUI, API, CLI you can do in DSL

plus enables data-driven implementations

• Saw great adoption among our customers for large scale implementation

• Provides huge improvements over former approaches for onboarding and process-maintenance for complex orgs.

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State of the art before ElectricFlow DSL

• Create parameterized ElectricFlow objects with UI for reuseo It was possible to do automated authoring with ec-perl, though

that was generally reserved for "synthetic" or "meta" coding

• Project exports

• Plugins for versioning and portability

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Mini case study at Financial Services company

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Challenge

• Huge number of existing applications (thousands!)• Server-type orientation to infrastructure• Wide range of delivery processes and technology stacks

(.NET, Java, etc.)• Many new applications in the pipeline • Three week release cycle• Strict Maintenance Windows and regulatory/compliance

guidelines

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Requirements

• On-board existing applications• On-board new teams• Accommodate new applications• Cover 80% with model• Strict and detailed user/group access controls• Separate ElectricFlow server clusters for development, test

and production

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Approach

• Customer created a self-service web portal to enable product owners to onboard applications

• Portal accepts application, infrastructure and releases details

• Portal sends configuration description to ElectricFlow• ElectricFlow generates custom objects based on

configuration• ElectricFlow procedures used to generate these objects• DSL used to manage all access controls• All (except credentials) managed in Source Control

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Sample File structure

Projects

Release procedures

installProgram

runScript

Setup

procedures

createDeliveryManifest

createRelease

createRelease.groovy

steps

step1.pl

step2.sh

workflows

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Shared Source Code based Orchestration

• 1 Project for each application group

• Application model snapshot'd to allow evolution without impact

• Version manifest managed in Property Sheet to allow simple run of pipeline

• Release and Applications data stored to properties

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Electric Flow

Setup Project

Onboarding and Refresh

User Input Web UI

Release InfraApp

Release Project

JSON

Run ProcedureNew App Project

DSL+JSON

App/Release/Env Properties

Refresh App

Refresh Release

DSL

DSL

App & Env Models

Pipeline & Release Models

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Advantages realized by DSL

• Source controlled versioning of orchestration• Orchestration reuse• Easily support incremental changes• Self documenting• Many people can work on the same process design through

code merging• IDE development more efficient for developers• Data-driven model creation• Models can have group-specific values hard-coded, making

for a cleaner end-user experience

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Business Impact of DSL

• Enables self-service while maintaining compliance

• Gives organizations control over processes used for SW delivery

• Enforce separation of duty• Consolidation and standardization of pipeline and

practices saves management overhead• Enable less skilled operators to execute advanced

processes and compliance checks

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DSL, give it a try!

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What we’re working on to make DSL better

• Toggle between GUI and DSL editor – New!

• Testing framework

• EC-Admin

• PluginLiteo ReleaseDemoo EC-Supporto EF-Utilities

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Resources

• DSL IDE Shipped with Electric Flow 6.5: https://github.com/electric-cloud/EC-DSLIDE

• PluginLite: https://github.com/electric-cloud/PluginLite

• Data-driven Release Example: https://github.com/electric-cloud/ReleaseDemoPlugin

• DSL Samples: https://github.com/electric-cloud/DSL-Samples

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Technical details to keep in mind with DSL

• Everything read from the server, cluster challenge

• Debugging: easier in 7.0 with println support

• Limited feedback during evaluation

• Deletions don't occur automatically (idempotent)

• Careful with deleting application, can lose inventory and snapshot data

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Thank you!