As the Dev Ops Manager, I need to start planning our CI/CD release process

Part of the CI/CD Development Series

Once we have our Deployment Diagram designed, we need to figure out out to get from here to there. If the end point is the appropriate server environment, the starting point is the developer with his/her hand on the keyboard. These steps take place on a variety of machines, within various process and can changes based on what files are checked in or not.

At the moment, we've only created the early basics as seen below.

The Beginning of our Deployment Activity Chart

Even though there is quite a long way to go there are some elements which we have already been determined. For example

• We have determined the broad strokes of our technology stack. This is going to be React on the front end and ColdFusion on the server side.
• We have determined that we are going to be using linting on both the CF and React paths. CFLint for the CF and ESLint for the Javascript
• We have determined that we are going to be formatters - CFFormat for CF and TBD for JS
• We have a security testing step on the CF site which is Fixinator from Foundeo. We will look for something on the React side to complement this. 
• We are doing automated tests for both. This will be Testbox from Ortus Solutions for the CF and, for the moment at least, Jest for the JS side. 

We've also implicitly stated that all of these steps need to take place before the code is checked into the local repo and definitely before it's checked or merged into the development branch. We'll look more on ways to automate this process in future entries. Which leads us to the other this which has also been decided which is our merging strategy. 

Merging Strategy

While there are several different options from mandating pull requests to very specified branching policies, I'd like to keep this as simple as possible and have, at least conceptually, three branches. Two of these are:

Master: This branch is always the "production ready code". In fact, each time that code is committed to this branch, it will try to be deployed so this is, by definition, the production code. 

Development: This branch is the main source for other branches in that it has the latest up to date code that has been checked in, even code that isn't ready for production yet. This code will end being deployed but to our live testing server. From the Deployment Diagrams, this is an internal facing site that our testers, management and internal review teams can view to see how things are progressing. This can be both good (they are reassured since they see things appearing and working to a point) or bad (they can wonder if they can see it, shouldn't it be live).

Developer / Feature branch: This is the branch which is basically whatever the developer is working on at the time whether it be a feature, hotfix or refactoring. As it gets complete and can be merged into the development branch, this branch can either disappear or continue depending on what is called for. 

This strategy is based on this article which I reached from the BitBucket website: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/. Some of the items might not necessarily be apropos for a continuous deployment environment (such as versioning etc) so we can probably pare it down but we'll go into that more clearly in a different post.