DevOps: Sprint 4 (July 29-August 11, 2020)

Note: We did not record a formal sprint review because the nature of the work accomplished is not something that translates well to a demo.

What was the goal of Sprint 4?
Sprint 4 was the last sprint of the Summer 2020 workcycle. The top priority of this sprint was to continue the Starlight migration work. We also wanted to start work on monitoring and observability.

What is the milestone that this sprint is supporting?
The overarching goal of this milestone was to tackle outstanding DevOps issues in the backlog to ensure that our in production applications (Shoreline and Starlight) are stable and can be deployed via CI/CD.

Accomplishments of Sprint 4:

• Removed support for file-based csv ingest for Starlight
• Fixed Renovate configuration so we are receiving dependency updates again
• Developed a migration strategy for Starlight. This will allow us to migrate our existing Starlight deployments to Helm/k8s, as well as eventually use this for populating Review apps with an instance of the Starlight documentation site
• Introduced initial support for email to the Starlight Helm chart. This follows the same pattern introduced in Shoreline.
• Procured new functional Google Connect accounts for sending email programmatically from UCSB Surfliner applications; have not yet successfully configured them.

Did we do everything we set out to accomplish?
No. Midway through the sprint we realized that we would not have the opportunity to schedule the needed discussions around monitoring and observability. The team agreed that these conversations would be a good DevOps breakout session topic for the next Surfliner-wide meeting.

What’s next?
The Surfliner team will be in an off workcycle until October 2020. Between now and then, we plan to hold a Surfliner-wide meeting and hopefully make some decisions regarding monitoring and observability. Both campuses plan to continue work on migrating our Starlight environments to Kubernetes using the updated Starlight Helm Chart. We expect continued collaboration as needed in this migration effort.

GitLab Link: https://gitlab.com/surfliner/surfliner/-/milestones/51