Author | Zhai Yongchao
Over the weekend, I received several notification messages about the expiration of the cloud server and prepared to renew the fee, which was thousands of large! Because these a few are cheap before snap up, pinch point a calculate, if renew, want to nibble a lot of profit!
As a self-supporting indie developer, cost-saving is an essential skill, otherwise how can you make a decent profit? Therefore, they began to think about making some structural adjustments to see if they could continue to run the current business at low cost under the circumstance of reduced server resources.
Because the business product is the most important, this area is largely untouchable. The ones that can move are peripherals, such as tools for task management, document management, or continuous delivery. After investigating many SaaS products and cloud services, I finally chose the cloud effect bucket of Ali Cloud. Why did you choose Yunxiao Family barrel? The core reason is still “whole family barrel” three words, basically I want to r & D management functions can cover. So what exactly does this family bucket do? Below, I would like to share the platform structure before and after my transformation to give you an intuitive understanding.
Old architecture: Bulk integration
The establishment of the old architecture basically refers to the common open source products and commercial products used to build the basic platform in the company, which are divided into the following functions:
- Code repository: GitLab
- Continuous integration: Jenkins
- Task management: JIRA
- Documentation management: Confluence
Both Gitlab and Jenkins are open source, free and widely used, and are included in most companies’ bulk solutions. JIRA and Confluence are commercial products, but the initial version of certification costs only $9.90 and is very user-friendly for individuals and small teams of less than 10 people. Thanks to JIRA’s powerful process configuration capabilities, it can be used as a gateway to the entire R&D management platform.
Add: There are many developers who think of JIRA as a task management tool and don’t know much about the workflow capabilities of JIRA, so here’s a brief explanation. A big part of JIRA’s power lies in its powerful workflow configuration capabilities. Since GitLab, Jenkins and other tools are supported by plugins in the WebHook or JIRA market, we can easily connect the steps of using these tools. This allows us to integrate the business requirements, task breakdown, code versioning, build and deployment of software development into a single portal like JIRA.
Resources used: Due to the low configuration of each server purchased before, most of them are 1C2G and 2C4G. For stable operation, they were deployed separately, consuming a total of 4 ECS.
Advantages of the scheme:
- Low cost of learning: These products are so common in Internet companies that most development will be familiar. At the same time, the ecosystem of these software is very sound, and there is a rich market for plug-ins to meet the various needs of users.
- Low product cost: The products used here are either free or very cheap, so the base cost of the cost is not high
Disadvantages of the scheme:
- High deployment cost: Many software products need to be installed, so the deployment cost is high
New architecture: Cloud Effect family bucket
After deciding to use cloud buckets, the next step was to find alternative solutions for the various products used in the old architecture. Follow my research steps below, to see the corresponding relationship of each product!
Code warehouse
Coderepository is a cloud Codeup product for cloud Effect solutions, codeup.aliyun.com/. If you’re like me, it’s very simple. As shown in the figure below, Codeup provides a dedicated import method for all common platforms. If you are not particularly familiar with Git management, you can easily follow the prompts to complete the repository migration.
After clicking “Import code base”, you can see the following interface. Basically, some commonly used Git management platforms are supported. Select the source platform you want to migrate to, and then according to the official website documents, find the authentication mode required by the corresponding platform and configure it.
After the authentication information has been configured, Codeup will retrieve all project repositories from the respective platforms. Simply select the repositories you want to import one by one and click the “Import” button to migrate the code.
This one is relatively simple, and almost all Git management platforms can support similar migration operations. Not a special highlight, from the point of view of code management, the main contribution is to save an ECS for the transformation plan.
Continuous integration
After the code migration is completed, the continuous integration part will be completed. The corresponding product is Cloud effect Flow, and the product address is flow.aliyun.com/.
Creating a CI/CD pipeline in cloud Flow is simple because it provides configuration templates for multiple continuous integration cases in various major development languages.
Here I have tried to configure a Spring Boot back-end application to deploy on ECS by selecting the first recommended template shown above. The pipeline configuration interface as shown below will appear. Click each step to configure details
Click on each step to configure details such as: How to build with Maven commands, how to upload artifacts
In the deployment operation, because of the combination with Ali cloud, can be very convenient associated to the account under the resources to choose deployment, so you do not have to maintain their own server list, especially convenient!
Does this pipelining feature allow cloud native applications to build multiple deployments at once? I also tried to do the following, the general process is: in the test environment, do build, upload products, deployment; In pre environment, make selection products, deployment; In pro environment, site selection, implementation and deployment. This relatively common CI/CD management process was simulated.
As shown in the figure above, it can be satisfied. This already meets my continuous integration requirements. However, as for the step of assembly line series and product selection, the supported user experience is not particularly good, and it took me some time to complete the configuration and consultation. It is reported that this part of the experience will be improved soon in the September 15th version! Iteration is very fast, very powerful!
It is worth mentioning here that the various operation templates provided in cloud Effect Flow are very suitable for our domestic users. For example, you can see the process details of my test environment. Code scanning is added here, which covers the inspection report of Alibaba code regulations, etc.
And for the notice reminder is also very consistent with the management characteristics of the domestic development team, providing dingding, enterprise wechat, feishu these domestic commonly used software support.
Well, cloud Flow saved me another Jenkins ECS.
Management portal
When I talked about the old architecture, I mentioned that the main reason to use JIRA was to use it as a gateway to overall R&D management, because it could integrate all the other surrounding facilities. For example: task management, continuous integration trigger, and so on. So in the cloud effect bucket, is there a product that plays such a role? As a one-stop solution, it has to be arranged, and the corresponding product is Cloud DevOps, devops.aliyun.com/.
At this point you might ask, are task management and document management not replaced? Must be replaced! It’s just that cloud DevOps as a portal really covers both. So let’s take a look at the power of cloud DevOps!
The product is quick to pick up because it provides some common templates. I’ll just give DevOps the development template to create.
Once you’ve created it, isn’t it easy to see that requirements, iterations, tasks, defects, test plans, and version management in the menu are substitutes for JIRA? And knowledge base is a replacement for Confluence!
It also provides the Excel import function, so I just need to export the Issue from JIRA and import it here, then I can continue to do the previous task management!
At the same time, as a management portal, the cloud effect Codeup and cloud effect Flow introduced before can also be linked. Just click the code and pipeline in the menu (when just created, you need to click the association to select the code warehouse and pipeline configured under the same account), you can view and achieve daily operations!
At this point, cloud DevOps are almost done with JIRA and Confluence in the bulk solution, no problem with releasing two ECS!
conclusion
Finally, after reviewing the bulk plan made by myself and the use of yunxiao buckets, I think there are several benefits:
- Cost reduction: 4 ECS saved. For individual developers or small teams like us, cloud effects are basically free.
- Easy operation and maintenance: with ali cloud highly integrated, for the maintenance of resources and associated operations more convenient!
Cloud DevOps is a product that works very well in my scenario, and the core reason is that it already does. But there may be some difficulties if you want to do very complex management, such as: In the current version, I didn’t find similar JIRA as powerful workflow support, so if there are some complex process management team, for example, many people participate in the review process, and linkage with other system, there has been no good support, however, in the junior partner with cloud effect consulting such functions, learned that this type of functionality has been closed, So the specific function support, and so on the back of the public test we wait and see).
As far as the function of the whole family barrel of cloud effect is concerned, I think the most suitable group is me or small and medium-sized team! If you are building this kind of management platform selection, and like me, budget and manpower are limited, then you might as well try this product cloud effect! Together white piao together cool! Especially the server resources in Ali cloud partners, really can’t miss!
If you don’t have a hands-on project to experience Cloud DevOps, but would like to learn about the development management product. You can also try it by participating in the 1-minute code automatic bug hunt.
Click the link below to experience the cloud DevOps family bucket immediately! www.aliyun.com/product/yun…