Add the ability to use the autopilot plugin for Cloud Foundry

[jsloyer]

Currently the Cloud Foundry command line allows the use of plugins to do additional things with deployments. A particular plugin AutoPilot allows the user to perform Blue/Green deployments for ensuring there is no downtime for their apps.

This issue is to get the idea on the books. I am offering to do the work for this but just wanted to bring the idea up to the community.

[jsloyer]

I would like to suggest the way to do this is adding the config to .travis.yml. The usage of this plug is below.

go get github.com/concourse/autopilot
cf install-plugin $GOPATH/bin/autopilot
cf login -a ${CF_API} -u ${CF_USERNAME} -p ${CF_PASSWORD} -o ${CF_ORG} -s ${CF_SPACE}
cf zero-downtime-push myapp -f manifest.yml

Proposed syntax below.

  plugin:
    url: github.com/concourse/autopilot
    installCommand: $GOPATH/bin/autopilot
    command: zero-downtime-push

Full .travis.yml file with proposed syntax.

language: node_js
node_js:
- '0.12'
sudo: required
deploy:
  edge: true
  provider: cloudfoundry
  api: xxxx
  username: xxxxx
  manifest: manifest.yml
  password: xxxx
  organization: xxxx
  space: xxxx
  plugin:
    url: github.com/concourse/autopilot
    installCommand: $GOPATH/bin/autopilot
    command: zero-downtime-push

[jimlindeman]

So is the trade-off here is that the coordination of the blue-green app-swap (route-management and app scaling commands to CF) is driven by the CF command-line tool? I assume the issuer of this command have to maintain network connectivity while the update is going on in the background (which can be a problem for long running "version A vs. version B" tests).

[jsloyer]

@jimlindeman I guess Im pissing your point, is your comment a statement?

[jsloyer]

Closing... No need for this, the correct way looks like scripts. For example a script that does this, https://github.com/18F/cf-blue-green.

[afeld]

As the author of that aforementioned script, I recommend using autopilot instead 😄 They do largely the same thing, but autopilot enforces some better habits, and is better maintained.

Would there be any interest in supporting autopilot as an option for the Cloud Foundry deploy? I think it would be fairly straightforward to add support...would you consider a pull request?

[afeld]

Bump!

[rafael-nogueras]

@afeld I think integration of Autopilot with the CloudFoundry Travis provider would be awesome, and exactly what I'm looking for! I hope they DO consider a pull request from you. :-D

[afeld]

Looked into this a bit...it would require two additions to the configuration:

• Specifying that you want to do zero-downtime deployment
• Specifying the application name (autopilot can only deploy one application at a time)

The latter is a bit of a bummer, in that it would require a special setup for deploying multiple applications (e.g. a backend server and a frontend server)...probably(?) still worth including to cover the majority of cases.

[afeld]

Submitted! #610