Extending CI Past Traditional Dev & Release Process

- Traditional 'CI' - The Build Server
- Using the CI Server to test site availability
  - process availability
  ? Overkill?
   - not if less than the overhead of involving infrastructure department
   - Can see build server reporting and availability all in one report

- Used to test assumptions about vendor app configuration (DB) (Custom metadata)
  - also extends to Dummy customer setup

- Automated Deployments
  - Definition - to any environment - command line trigger?
  - auto deploy from CI Server for manual testing
  - required for CI automated functional testing
  - no one is doing it to production (without workflow management)
- Tableaux - a product used in Suncorp for Workflow and Depoloyments all the way to production
- System that automates your current 300 manual steps
 + incl workflow and QA signoff checks recording

- Local Devs use their Hudson CI Server
 - Output from Hudson build #340 is input to Tableau server - which does environment staging

- Discussion about separation of concerns in deployment as equivalent to Accounting Separation of Concerns

- Monitoring System Load
  - Metrics on load components  of the system

- Length of Build queues on CI Server
  - CI Background Hum
    - 15% of build failures caused by infrastructure dropouts

- builddoctor.com
   - CI - building a machine from scratch

- Infrastructure CI - testing on 'firewall server' - copy of production - checking for extra exceptions