Infrastructure

1. Infrastructure Automation

Create an infrastructure automation pipeline that prepares the environment for application deployment using the Infrastructure as Code approach. Infrastructure configuration should be in a separate repository from the application source code.

Preparation Steps

Some preparation steps can be done manually or by running automation scripts locally:

• Remote State Storage: If you’re going to use Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage as a remote state storage for Terraform, it should be created in advance.
• GitLab SaaS: If you’re going to use GitLab SaaS (GitLab.com), you need a runner for your first job. Initially, it can be installed on your local machine.
• Jenkins: If you’re going to use Jenkins, then create a virtual machine, install Jenkins, and take care of agents.

Infrastructure Provisioning Pipeline

Use GitLab or Jenkins to run the infrastructure provisioning pipeline. It should include the following jobs:

1. Configuration Formatting
2. Configuration Validation and Scanning (optional)
3. Plan
4. Provisioning Resources (manual job)
5. Destroying Resources (manual job)

Resources to Create with Terraform

Use Terraform to create the following resources in the cloud:

• Virtual Machine: With all the needed network-related resources and a Load Balancer. This VM will be used to host the application.
• Persistent Database: For the application.
• Additional Virtual Machine (optional): With all the needed network-related resources to run additional software like GitLab runners, Nexus (if used).

Software Installation with Ansible

Use Ansible to install additional software on the virtual machines, including:

• Docker and Docker Compose
• Jenkins with workers or GitLab runners
• Nexus (if used)

2. CI/CD Solution

A Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery solution for the Java application spring-petclinic.

Repository Requirements

The repository with the spring-petclinic application source code should additionally have configuration files for Maven or Gradle and a Dockerfile.

Artifact Storage

Prepare a registry in the artifact storage of your choice.

Pipeline for Merge Request (MR) or Pull Request (PR)

The pipeline should include:

1. Static Code Analysis
2. Tests
3. Build
4. Creating an Artifact: It can be tagged with a short commit hash.
5. Pushing the Artifact: To the artifact storage.

Pipeline for the Main Branch

The pipeline should include:

1. Creating a Git Tag: In the repository using Semantic Versioning approach (a minor version increases on each commit). A Python script with semver · PyPI can be used here.
2. Creating an Artifact: With Git tag representing the version.
3. Pushing the Artifact: To the artifact storage.
4. Manual Deployment Job:
   • Connects to a virtual machine.
   • Checks if a previous version of the application is present and removes it.
   • Gets the image from the artifact storage.
   • Runs the application making sure it is connected to a MySQL database in the cloud.
   • Prints the link to the application.

Monitoring (Optional)

Use a cloud-based monitoring solution to create a dashboard with resource consumption metrics for the VM where the spring-petclinic application is running.

Architecture Diagram

Create an architecture diagram for your solution.