Project Nudge: A Beech Valley Software Project

Beech Valley can be thought of as the gig economy for the accounting industry. We operate as a fairly lean team so how we approach executing work comes with that in mind. Here’s how we ideated, planned, and executed one of our latest successful projects here at Beech Valley.

Spinnaker deployment pipelines

One of the questions I see come up quite often in slack are how to model deployment pipelines which do not follow `trigger` -> `bake image with *nix package artifact` -> `deploy image`

Setting up Spinnaker authentication with Okta and SAML

Recently Netflix in collaboration with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and CloudFoundry have released a new OSS deployment application called Spinnaker (Asgard 2.0). Our team has been going through and setting up this tool to be production ready for our environments as we had been planning to move to a new deployment tool anyway. This post in particular will go into the details of setting up SAML authentication through Okta with Spinnaker.

Team workflow using littlechef to manage infrastructure

Littlechef is a library allowing one to use chef without a centralized server orchestrating configuration management. It simplifies the testing and deployment model for managing servers by removing a layer from the stack. What this does is let you provision servers using your cli or programmatically in a similar fashion to ansible.

Development Pipeline for the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel

The Cloud Control Panel at Rackspace has ~30 developers split into 8 subteams. All of them are expected to have the ability to modify any part of the system, however, each subteam has some type of specialized knowledge of the product or infrastructure. Our team has a CI/CD pipeline in which we deploy up to 10 times a day (every hour during business hours). This evolved from a pipeline where every merge triggered a deploy.