The Pipeline

We have some sad news to share. Today we are announcing the end of life (EOL) for Snap CI. The planned final day will be August 1st 2017.

I wanted to take a look at my first year as the product manager for Snap CI and share with you my top 5 lessons learned from 2016.

Here’s our 2016 review on the most popular articles on Snap CI’s The Pipeline blog. Great reading for that isolated desert island.

Caching is a very common way to speed up builds by storing local files and dependencies that are needed for your builds instead of getting them from their respective mirrors on the internet each time one runs a pipeline.

How to get your Snap CI builds deployed on DigitalOcean Droplet

A beginner’s guide to understanding continuous delivery

We’ll create a container and then constrain the number of processes that container can spawn so a rogue user can’t create a fork bomb inside of it!

What are containers, how do they work, and what is LXC?

Caricatures, Ruby, and Snap, oh my!

ThoughtWorks said “HOLD” regarding Jenkins as a deployment pipeline on their Tech Radar earlier this year. We think that Snap CI is a great alternative to Jenkins. But why?

I went to GitHub Universe. I heard stuff. I liked some of it. Hopefully you will too.

Willem Louis van der Poel came up with the zero, one, infinity heuristic. We find that remains a useful way to think of design parameters and constraints.

Here are three compelling reasons why fast-moving, successful software development teams are choosing Snap CI for continuous integration and continuous deployment over tools like Jenkins.

Why should you care about these practices? Here’s why continuous delivery is a product manager’s new BFF.

Here are five ways to increase speed through continuous delivery and continuous integration practices.

Most applications these days have some form of deployment automation which is often implemented using an Infrastructure as Code tool. So what role do these tools play in a blue-green world?

Lessons I learned the hard way about disappearing packages, rebuilding regularly, and more.

In this second part, we learn about why dark launching, or feature toggles, become important when deploying to production daily

Lessons I learned the hard way about scripting, database migrations, and more.

Our contextual research findings about CI, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment and DevOps

How serverless architecture allowed a news site to try new things and move faster.

How Snap CI helped a charity project track everything and the importance of understanding your users to make better technology and design choices and build better products.

The pros and cons of having your chef code with your code and in a separate repo

A guide to learning about what and how DevOps and Continuous Delivery means to Product Managers.

Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap

Feature Toggles, sometimes referred to as Dark Launching, was something we eventually grew into on Snap CI. Learn about our evolution here.

Google, MercyCorps, ThoughtWorks, and UNHCR Join Forces to Create Aid-Focused Translation App

Why we named our new stacks Aurora and Cybele

If you are going to incentivize certain behavior in your development team, make sure that you are checking regularly to make sure that you are not encouraging them to breed cobras

Serverless architecture is a perfect solution for online ticketing sales provider, Applauze. See how it works with their large bursts of traffic.

DevOps knowledge-sharing in Seattle on June 7

A beginner’s guide to understanding continuous delivery

Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap

Just because an activity is draining doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, you should just make sure it is the most effective use of your team’s energy.

Here are three easy troubleshooting tips for common problems on Snap CI

In our third post in a series on serverless architectures, we talk to long-time Snap CI customers Applauze about why they chose a serverless architecture to provide reliable, cost-efficient and stable architecture for their spiky, demand-driven traffic.

Snap is the next evolution in continuous delivery & continuous integration software from ThoughtWorks, with built-in expertise and best practices from well-known technology leaders.

Although it’s still early days, serverless architecture can essentially evaporate architecture, freeing up administrators to deal with the inherent complexity of their domain rather than its framework.

Serverless architecture is another step on the virtualization journey

“Container” is such a vague word. It’s an even vaguer concept.

ThoughtWorks doesn’t just talk Continuous Delivery best practices: it supports them by creating powerful build-and-deploy tools and sponsoring forward-looking events like DevOpsDays

Ever wonder how to DevOps? Here’s a video on how ThoughtWorks’ Snap CI and GoCD do it

Discussion on being lean, scaling agile methodologies, scaling agile change management techniques for leadership, and best practices for adopting Continuous Delivery.

A collection of articles, how-to’s, and other interesting reads from the team members of ThoughtWork’s Snap CI

How unit tests, continuous integration and continuous delivery with deployment pipeline help get feedback and get better

I’m going to tell you why Baremetrics is an awesome reporting tool for SaaS product managers

Here’s how you use Continuous Deployment to delivery a static website using AWS and Snap CI

Teams have been automating the build, test and deploy processes of their software for many years, but usually in a very specific “one off” manner. This piece walks through 3 key patterns, among many, to setting up a successful deployment pipeline.

A collection of articles, how-to’s, and other interesting reads from the team members of ThoughtWork’s Snap CI

It’s difficult to find someone who would argue that we should estimate an entire software project without having written a single line of code for it.

Using the Snap Shell stage debug rerun feature allows you to debug directly in the browser without having to reconfigure and rerun an entire pipeline

Download Snap’s free eBook on CD Strategies, containing techniques for Blue/Green Servers, Phoenix Servers and more

Tramchester UK used Snap CI to maintain and update their mobile web app which helps people navigate the Manchester tram network.

The difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment is quite simple, but something most people don’t understand. Here’s an easy way to remember.

Continuous Delivery is not just about automating deployments. In this article, we talk about three recurring architectural challenges while enabling CD.

Understanding the problems about not encrypting secrets and discussing the solutions

The need of having multiple stages in your delivery pipeline caused some UI problems, solved by Snap CI’s new pipeline interface

The web has come far from the days of AJAX polling to where the browser constantly polled the server for updates. In general there are a few ways to get a message from a server to a browser, each of these has their benefits and drawbacks.

ThoughtWorks’ Continuous Delivery Products Snap CI and GoCD Come Together at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 to Showcase Innovation in Continuous Delivery

Trunk based development is a leading indictor of high performance teams. In this article, we will talk about how TBD helps, best practices, and how to enable it with Deployment Pipelines.

With Snap APIs, you can have some fun trying out new things, including designing your own deployment buttons from your phone.

Snap CI has had pull request integration with GitHub for quite some time now. In this article, we will discuss why this is an excellent collaboration mechanism

Security aspects around using containers for build environments led to our decision choosing the container technology for provisioning build environments in Snap CI

A new approach at releasing deployments that would reduce risk and regain confidence

Part 2 of the series on “Bringing Docker support on Snap CI”. In this article, we delve a little deeper into container technologies and the different types of containers.

Part 1 of our series on ‘Bringing Docker Support to Snap CI’. Here, we talk about how Snap CI currently provides build environments for user builds.

Quick intro of Snap’s global environment variables feature.

In Snap CI, the deployment pipeline can be modeled as a series of custom build stages. Each stage consists of a set of commands which are run to accomplish a specific purpose.

This article describes some of the implementation techniques for performing Canary Releases.

This Continuous Deployment Strategy article describes some of the implementation techniques for performing blue/green deployments.

Learn implementation techniques for various Continuous Deployment Strategies.

Continuous Delivery is a journey, not a destination. Listen to Badri and Akshay discuss this topic from the Pipeline Conference.

Snap CI will use rbenv to install rubies on your build machines.

Mingle and Snap are excited to announce they will award $500 prizes for the best blog posts on specific topics for AirPair’s developer writing competition.

Fernando Junior, a developer usually based in Recife, Brazil, but currently in Pune, India, tells us all about life on the Snap team.

Access the notification center from the “build history” page, and the ability to specify exactly what aspects of your build you wish to be notified about.

With Snap CI, you get to run your builds on workers as large as you might need.

Everybody loves faster feedback on their builds, including us. We would now like to announce to you the ability to run your build across multiple “workers”.

Snap has built in support for several Platforms-as-a-Services(PAAS), yet it is surprisingly easy to add any provider that accepts git push deployments.

Snap’s stages currently provide an isolated environment around every command that you run in them.

You can now use Snap’s Elastic Beanstalk Deploy recipe. Have a look at the AWS getting started guide for steps on how to create a Beanstalk application.

AWS OpsWorks is a service that allows you to create and manage these resources collectively in a stack.

CVE-2014-6271, commonly known as the ShellShock bug with GNU bash was made. The fix for this was incomplete and a new vulnerability was identified.

Given how much we love the language, and how many people have asked us for it, we thought it best to document how to get your Clojure projects building on Snap.

When someone issues a pull-request, Snap will automatically set up a pipeline, attempt to merge the request into the upstream branch, and run the pipeline.

Snap offers you the ability to diagnose a build, and making it a lot more straightforward. Just type `snap-shell` as a command in your pipeline configuration.

What is the difference between Snap CI and other continuous delivery tools?

Releasing every change you make to rubygems.org is likely not the best way to release usable chunks of functionality to your users.

The various partners that Snap works with (Amazon AWS, Heroku, Github etc) have taken steps to contain the impact of the Heartbleed vulnerability.

For this blog post, we wanted to show how we swap out the real S3 tool for something that works better for local development.

There are well known patterns to using branches, in a disciplined manner, despite having their fair share of problems.

Snap now has the AWS CLI installed on all build boxes, allowing you to perform a number of AWS operations including deploying to AWS using Elastic Beanstalk

In this post, I will talk about how to set up a build for simple Scala/Play project on Snap CI.

This blog post describes how to use Snap to deploy your Dropwizard services to Heroku with deployment pipelines.

Using Heroku OAuth makes Snap a single point of contact for deploying your code to an existing app on Heroku or even creating a new app for deployments.

We’re excited to announce that we’re adding support for 3 of the most requested NoSQL datastores; CouchDB, MongoDB and Redis generally available for all builds.

At Snap, we believe that any Continuous Integration tool, hosted or not, should treat deployments as a first class member of the Continuous Integration process.

Snap CI can clone an existing build pipeline, but point it at a different source tree/branch. Within minutes, your new patch can be tested, integrated and pushed out to production

A working build pipeline means that you are guaranteed that the exact same set of git commits that trigger a stage also trigger the following ones.

I believe that the ability to reliably release your application, early & often, with a degree of quality, is an essential aspect of development discipline.

Isn’t it time your CI tool learnt about those conventions and decided to do the provisioning of the machine?