Ironfan-CI: Continuous Testing for your Architecture

Ironfan, the foundation of the Infochimps Platform, is an expressive toolset for constructing scalable, resilient architectures. It works in the cloud, in the data center, and on your laptop, and it makes your system diagram visible and inevitable. Inevitable systems coordinate automatically to interconnect, removing the hassle of manual configuration of connection points (and the associated danger of human error). For more information about Ironfan and the Infochimps Platform, visit infochimps.com.

This repo implements continuous testing for your architecture:

• cookbooks to set up a local chef server and jenkins master
• vagrant definitions for the operating systems ironfan supports
• test framework that combines cucumber to verify the silverware announcement contract
• (soon) hooks to tie these CI tests to your monitoring system

Getting Started

To jump right into using Ironfan, follow our Installation Instructions. For an explanatory tour, check out our Hadoop Walkthrough. Please file all issues on Ironfan Issues.

Index

Ironfan-CI works together with the full ironfan toolset:

Core Tools:

• ironfan-homebase: Centralizes the cookbooks, roles and clusters. A solid foundation for any Chef user.
• ironfan gem: The core Ironfan models, and Knife plugins to orchestrate machines and coordinate truth among your homebase, cloud and chef server. It comes with ironfan-homebase.
• ironfan-pantry: Our collection of industrial-strength, cloud-ready recipes for Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Zabbix and more.
• silverware cookbook: Helps you coordinate discovery of services ("list all the machines for awesome_webapp, that I might load balance them") and aspects ("list all components that write logs, that I might logrotate them, or that I might monitor the free space on their volumes"). Found within the ironfan-pantry.

Core Documentation:

• ironfan wiki: High-level documentation and install instructions.
• ironfan issues: Bugs or questions and feature requests for any part of the Ironfan toolset.
• ironfan gem docs: Rdoc docs for Ironfan.

Note: Ironfan is not compatible with Ruby 1.8. All versions later than 1.9.2-p136 should work fine.

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in progress: some of the below is speculative (@sya)

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You can use VeeWee, Vagrant and Virtualbox to make chef development ridiculously funner.

Testing homebase

Just need the vagrants, no knife or anything --

• chef server username is runner username

• looks in ~/.chef/{username}.pem for user key

• looks in ~/.chef/{organization}-testing-credentials/client_keys/client-{node_name}.pem for chef client key

• To populate chef node,

  knife cluster sync sandbox --no-cloud --sync-all
  

Building boxes

• follow instructions in ironfan_ci/README.md

Building vagrants with knife

Script Integration:

require 'vagrant'

# Example of emulating vagrant up with some code around it
task :up do
  puts "About to run vagrant-up..."
  env = Vagrant::Environment.new(:cwd => "/path/to/my/project")
  env.cli("up")
  puts "Finished running vagrant-up"
end

task :graceful_down do
  env = Vagrant::Environment.new(:cwd => "/path/to/my/project")
  env.vms.each do |vm|
    vm.channel.sudo("halt")
  end
end

These are the parts of the vagrant automation:

• convert cluster definition to Vagrantfile
• knife provisions vagrant servers
• a set of conventions for using Vagrant with chef in a local debugging or testing environment.

on desktop:

• ssh key for machine

on desktop and chef server:

• server.rb
• validation.pem
• validator.pem
• cookbooks
• roles

on desktop and chef client:

• chef-dna.json
• client.pem
• validator.pem
• client.rb
• data bag keys

Here's what you need:

• jenkins server, properly installed and configured

• worker machines:

  • jenkins worker
  • discoverable by jenkins
  • virtualbox, vagrant etc

• a testing chef server

• vagrants that are clients of the testing chef server

Decisions

you can either go

A: [jenkins] -> on worker -> vagrant up, vagrant ssh [chef-client runner], vagrant rollback

B: [jenkins] -> vagrant up (becomes a jenkins ssh worker) -> jenkins ssh [chef-client runner]

I went with A, because it lends itself to a distributed setup; doesn't have the potential confounding effects of the jenkins ssh-ness; and is easy for me to simulate and debug

FIXME

• there are OSX things in odd places within jenkins
• there are lots of roles running about inside chimpstation

Troubleshooting

• make sure you have remote login on for all users -- visit the 'Sharing' System Prefences to correct this:

  sshd: fatal: Access denied for user _jenkins by PAM account configuration