As part of the Sumo Logic’s Thought Leadership Series, JFrog’s Co-founder and Chief Architect, Fred Simon, came together with Sumo Logic’s Chief Architect, Stefan Zier, last week to share their insights into topics ranging from continuous integration and delivery to building apps with Docker and architecting for microservices. The series launches in advance of a webinar on July 21 at 10:00 am that dives into the JFrog Sumo Logic integration.
The two-part series begins with each describing the problem they were trying to solve at startup. As Fred explains, JFrog co-founders were looking for a way to automate the delivery of software components and how to manage open source that is today being created exponentially. Today there is no single piece of software that is created from scratch – you aggregate. So, together with Yoav Landman, they launched the Artifactory open-source project in December 2006. As Fred explains, it was a very successful open-source project and so they started JFrog in 2008. Now, Fred says, “we are in the business of speed.” The process of getting from idea to code to deployed in the hands of customers is fully automated
Stefan then explains Sumo Logic’s roots as a log-management service in the cloud. Sumo Logic wasn’t the first, but what they saw is that customers struggled to keep their log management solutions running, especially when they tried to scale. “We found that customers were spending half their time keeping their product running beyond a certain scale as opposed to using the product, which is really what you’re trying to get out of it. At about that same time in 2010, we attended a talk by Werner Vogels on Amazon Web Services, he’s the CTO there…. We had this eye-opening moment and we built this as a pure-play SaaS, elastic scaling system, from the ground up. That gives you a lot of benefits. You get updates automatically, you don’t have to worry about managing machines… so 100% of the time you spend using the product.”
Both were then asked about how they practice continuous delivery. Stefan explains that Sumo Logic typically checks code into Github, a developer pushes into a branch, creates a pull request and two things happen in parallel: other developers review the pull request and a Jenkins toolchain kicks off a set of tests against that branch to ensure that nothing is broken. “Once the test passes and the pull request is approved we merge it into the master branch. There’s a whole set Jenkins jobs running off of master that builds artifacts… We run a microservices architecture and our system consists of about 40 different microservices. Depending on what code you touched, one of those microservices will get built and there’s going to be a new binary we push up into both Artifactory and S3. Once that happens we have an integration deployment that automatically gets the update pushed into it.” So there’s a constant stream of microservices that get pushed where a set of integration tests are run. Once those tests pass, it is labelled as a Gold Star build. Within a few hours the Gold Star deployment goes into a longevity test deployment where it is monitored for a time before rolling out to production.
Following on, Fred describes JFrog’s process. You can view Part 1 of Optimizing Continuous Integration and Delivery on Youtube. Here’s a sneak peek:
Sumo Logic Integration in Artifactory
In May at JFrog’s swampUP, Sumo Logic and JFrog jointly announced a partnership that will deliver industry-first technology that gives software developers and DevOps teams unprecedented insights into their software development operations as they build, run and secure their modern applications. As part of the partnership, the companies introduced a new solution that will allow JFrog users to access advanced analytics and metrics with out-of the box dashboards directly from JFrog Artifactory, and analyze all data Artifactory generates. Now JFrog developers and DevOps teams using Artifactory, the universal artifact repository, will be able to leverage Sumo Logic’s expertise in machine learning and predictive analytics to make decisions on an automated basis.
JFrog has been a customer of Sumo Logic for some time, and Fred in particular has been a power user of Sumo Logic’s query language and dashboards. Hence, the Sumo Logic App for Artifactory was born in 2015. During development of the original app, JFrog provided feedback that led to six dashboards that enable Artifactory users to get insights into their Artifactory repositories. These same dashboards will power the recently announced integration between JFrog Artifactory and Sumo Logic. You can learn more about this integration in an upcoming webinar slated for July 21.
Summary
If you’d like to comment on the interviews or share your own practices for continuous integration and delivery, you can post them in the Developers section of the Sumo Logic Community.
In Part 2 of this series these two distinguished developers go on to share more about how they implement microservices and utilize Docker, and they also talk about the new integration that allows JFrog Artifactory users to get advanced analytics powered by Sumo Logic.
