Application deployment and management with Atlantis

Abstract:

This talk will present Atlantis, a new Docker-based deployment system which makes it easy to safely deploy applications in the cloud, flexibly configure routing among multiple versions, and handle dependencies among applications in multiple environments.

Deploys in any organization can be painful. Different engineering teams use different, and sometimes subtly incompatible, scripts. Leftovers from previous deploys can break new ones, or magically make new ones work. Rolling back is poorly tested, painful, slow, and sometimes just doesn’t work. Rolling out a feature that a new customer needs may break older features another one relies on.

Virtual machines and containers make it easy to solve some of these problems in the cloud, but are not the whole solution. Yes, you may get isolated systems and that can be deployed independently and quickly. But how do you know where to send traffic? How do apps talk to each other? How do you make sure apps that shouldn’t talk to each other don’t?

Enter Atlantis, a new Docker-based deploy and application management system we've built at Ooyala. Running in a cloud or on raw hardware, it uses Docker containers to split machines into single-application partitions, then provides a custom router to intelligently determine where to send traffic. Atlantis already has templates to build containers for apps written in popular languages.

The router can flexibly direct HTTP traffic based on the request and the applications deployed in Atlantis. Want to do a slow rollout? Just add a rule to send a fraction of traffic for the application to the new version. Want to route traffic to different versions of an app based on the customer making the request? Sure, add a rule, and it’s active nearly instantaneously.

Getting a new version of an app to production is easy. Build, deploy and now it's now running in parallel with the old. Traffic can be gradually moved over, and containers running the old version torn down slowly until all traffic is on the new version. To roll back simply send traffic back to the old containers.

That leaves only one small problem for most deployments. Maintain one Atlantis cluster for staging, another for integration and yet another for production? Well, you could use environments instead. Think of an environment is a set of ‘sandboxed’ applications talking to each other, with a little plumbing magic sprinkled on top. Environments are cheap, in fact any developer who likes to test-by-deploying can have his own!

We will also briefly cover other related topics, including security and scaling.

Speaker:

Cædman 'cads’ Oakley Application Infrastructure