[Linaro-validation] the need for three instances: production, staging and ... dogfood?

[Spring Zhang]

On 4 May 2012 13:18, Michael Hudson-Doyle <michael.hudson at linaro.org> wrote:

> Hi gang,
>
> As you may have seen if you actually read all the merge proposal email
> you get <wink>, as part of my quest to get us closer to a continuous
> delivery stype of development I've written a script that updates a LAVA
> instance to the tip of trunk of all the various LAVA components.  I will
> set things up so that this runs every night on the staging instance
> soon (need to fiddle things somehow so that a sudo password isn't
> necessary to restart the instance after the code is upgraded).
>
> However, Spring is right now using the staging instance to test some
> dispatcher changes.  If I'd set the cronjob I refer to above up and
> Spring was particularly unlucky, the cronjob would wipe out the changes
> he's made to the instance to test while he's testing them.  This seems
> less than ideal.
>
> Because what we do is always going to be hard to test outside a
> production like environment, I think what we need is yet another
> instance: one that we can hack about relentlessly as needed to test
> changes that we haven't yet landed.  I propose the name "dogfood" for
> this (maybe we'd even go as far as having scripts that completely
> removed the dogfood instance and could recreate it as needed to ensure a
> clean baseline).
>
> So we'd have:
>
>  * production: duh
>  * staging: this is _solely_ used to determine if changes that have
>   landed to the trunk of some component are safe to deploy to
>   production
>  * dogfood: random hacking
>
> I think that potentially we could have some way of bringing up dogfood
> instances as needed in our private cloud, but tbh for now one on control
> that we share amongst ourselves in a loose way (i.e. check on IRC before
> doing stuff with it) would be a useful thing.
>
> What do you guys think?
>
Usually we don't need such kind of instance, staging is enough. But for the
proxy case, it's an global configuration to lava-dispatcher and validation
farm server, which needs some debug during the testing, it happens in real
server. Yes I think dogfood is necessary though the usage would not be very
frequent.

>
> Cheers,
> mwh
>
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-- 
Best wishes,
Spring Zhang
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