Sainsburys

DevOps test for Sainsburys.

The task set can be found in task.docx.

Assumptions

I assume that you've got a recent Chef Development Kit and VirtualBox install.

Running the solution

./doit.sh

Testing

There are a few simple serverspec tests managed via Kitchen. They're not terribly thorough, but they are just about enough to show my approach in the context of this test. You can run them with kitchen like this:

kitchen test

Notes

My next step from where the test is, would be to restrict the app nodes so they only accept HTTP connections from the web node.

I'd prefer to use Docker and some sort of gossip based network discovery so that if an app node is added or removed the load balanced pool is very quickly updated, but that is beyond the scope of this exercise.

The exercise offers bonus points for automating build and delivery of updated code to the environment. My approach using Chef would be to create a native package and a local package repository and ensure that the latest version of this package was installed on all the app servers in the app recipe. Even this approach is quite naive however and does not cover the complexities of online database migrations, zero downtime deployments, or reduced risk deployments. I'd reach for a canary deployment or a blue/green deployment for these cases. However, I felt that this was beyond what was being asked for in the test.