Environments and deployment pipelines

[peteryates]

ECF2 will follow the continuous delivery model set out in DfE's technical guidance, we will follow the pattern established in ECF1 and the applications deployed on DfE's Azure space and follow the established conventions.

Environments

We will need the following environments, both in Azure and Rails. The names should match, so review apps run with the review Rails environment.

Test subscription (s189t01)

• [x] review
• [x] staging

Production subscription (s189p01)

• [x] migration (temporary, will be used while testing the importing of data from ECF1)
• [x] sandbox (maybe rename this to lead_provider_sandbox to make it clear what it's for)
• [x] production

Pipelines

On every commit to a pull request

• [x] syntax is checked with rubocop-govuk
• [x] tests are run
• [x] security checks are run (Brakeman or Bearer)
• [x] review app is deployed

The ECF1 pipelines also run smoke tests and API performance tests, but we won't be ready for those for a while.

When a pull requests are closed or merged

• [x] destroy the review app

When pull requests are merged

• [x] all of the above steps
• [x] deploy to staging
• [x] deploy to sandbox/migration/production

Approach

Like in ECF1, build actions for bits we might want to reuse. This keeps things modular and makes the actual flows much shorter and easier to read.

We'll need help from @DFE-Digital/teacher-services-infrastructure with Azure keys for each environment.

[peteryates]

Having thought more about this I'd also like us to keep the root of the repo tidy and minimal. The infrastructure config is config - let's put it (both terraform and global_config) under config?

[saliceti]

Having thought more about this I'd also like us to keep the root of the repo tidy and minimal. The infrastructure config is config - let's put it (both terraform and global_config) under config?

This makes sense. The inconvenients are this will deviate from the template so paths must be amended, and it will make it a bit more difficult to support. Also "config" is specific to rails.

[peteryates]

That's fair, appreciate it brings a support burden too. Maybe having terraform at the project root isn't so bad and we put global_config in that directory too?

[gracecbrennan]

Steve is progressing through Terrafrom set-up

[peteryates]

@saliceti - you mentioned that we might be able to shorten the names by using s189pXXX instead of s189p01XXX. Is anything stopping us from making a start on this? i.e., do you need to do any work/config to support it?

[saliceti]

I suggest generating fresh code from template but tweak the azure naming in the template. If it works, you can PR the template.

[mason-emily]

@tonyheadford looking at this today

[gracecbrennan]

Ongoing work with the infrastructure team. Steve is chatting with Colin on this at the moment and we should soon have our resources available to build out environments.

[gracecbrennan]

Colin was due to take a look at this yesterday but that hasn't happened just yet - Steve will chase up with Colin.

[gracecbrennan]

Colin has review draft pull request and he is continuing to create Azure elements we can't self-serve on.

[mason-emily]

Waiting on infrastructure team - Colin is keeping an eye on this

[steventux]

https://trello.com/c/72rf64KK is the Trello card for infra work on this.

[peteryates]

We can use this action for building and pushing to the container registry.

[gracecbrennan]

Ticket is ongoing. Steve is doing a dry-run - will bring up test environment first and move onto prod etc.

[gracecbrennan]

Have got to a point of spinning up a review environment - this is currently timing out but Steve is going to look at this today.

[steventux]

We have a review app POC https://ec2-review-79-web.test.teacherservices.cloud/ which was created with terraform from https://github.com/DFE-Digital/ecf2/pull/79 Decided to break PRs down to each environment, the first (review env) PR is being checked by Colin. Will follow with staging and other envs, these should be fairly trivial in comparison to initial setup.

[peteryates]

I think it was the 'Development' section on the right that was causing this issue to close. I thought it'd close when all the development tasks were complete, not any of them 🙈 My fault, I've unlinked them now!

[mason-emily]

Staging environment is now up and running - waiting on code review on this

Working on migration environment today with Colin.

[gracecbrennan]

Steve working on migration issue.

[gracecbrennan]

Sandbox and Production remaining that we hope to get done this week.

[gracecbrennan]

Migration and Sandbox solved.

Pushing forward to production today!

[gracecbrennan]

All environments are now built!!!

Waiting for entire deployment pipeline working correctly before we can move to done.

[steventux]

Deploying to all environments