leanIX presents in DevOps track at Germany’s largest developer conference
Posted by Joerg G. Beyer on October 10, 2014
On October 9th & 10th the "Developer Conference" took place in Hamburg under the new name “cold.talks”. In its 4th year the two-day conference was a big success with its 1500 participants and 112 sessions. Since 2011 code.talks is one of the leading conferences and networking-events in the field of web-development. The conference impresses with latest inputs and contributions of experts. This year André and Daniel of LeanIX also participated as presenters. What makes this conference so special: All presentations are held in the big cinema audiences of the Cinemaxx Hamburg while the visitors enjoy their popcorn and nachos.
André’s and Daniel’s presentation in the DevOps track had the title “Free up resources for product development – automatization with Ansible and Jenkins”. The presentation deals with the key challenge of product providers like LeanIX: with increasing acceptance and demand on the market the requirements on scalability and functionality increase. While only a few technologies are needed for products in their starting phase, the variety increases with scale and maturity. That leads to a high management effort in using the product without adequate automatization. Tools like Jenkins and Ansible are two possible solutions to achieve that goal.
Jenkins is a widely used server for Continuous Integration (CI). CI enables modern SW-development possible as a new release of the product is automatically tested and compiled as soon as part of the source-codes in the version management is updated. This often and early testing allows to assure a high quality. The second tool, Ansible, facilitates the automatization of managing administrative tasks. Due to a structured language and prepackaged modules Ansible can install a whole server with all the necessary components like web server, database and so on within a few minutes. Large batch scripts are obsolete as Ansible places a lot of value on maintainability.
Daniel and André showed in their presentation how an Apache web server can be automatically installed and configurated by using Ansible:
