Terminology Definitions: Useful References
CI-related Articles
CI on a Dollar a Day by James Shore
Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler
Relevant Books
Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age by Kief Morris
- This is a fantastic book for overall exposure to the various pieces of a continuous delivery build pipeline. Any team considering building out a new continuous delivery build pipeline should read this book cover to cover before making any long-term tooling decisions. I have only read the first edition, but I suspect the second edition is just as good.
Continous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley
- Although the tool choices are very dated, the overall intentions are better explained than they are in Infrastructure as Code. In contrast, when looking at tool choices forget Continuous Delivery and read Infrastructure as Code.
Various Infrastructure as Code Tools
The tooling landscape around continuous delivery has evolved quite a bit and continues to evolve rapidly. I recommend you do a good bit of research to figure out which tools are currently optimal for your needs before committing to a given choice.
- Terraform understands the overall deployment topology and provides cross-node orchestration, leaving the node-specific details to Chef, Puppet, Ansible and the like.
- This is not strictly an Infrastructure as Code tool, but some of what is done with Terraform can alternatively be done using a Docker orchestration framework such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.
- I have not done the hands-on work to build out a complex CD pipeline in a few a years. Since that time things have evolved quite a bit. I believe some of the orchestration work which used to require writing a lot of bespoke code is now more readily available off the shelf.
Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation by Yevgeniy Brikman of Gruntwork