The Python Podcast.__init__ - Buildbot with Pierre Tardy -

May 14 2016 85 mins 2

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Summary

As technology professionals, we need to make sure that the software we write is reliably bug free and the best way to do that is with a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline. This week we spoke with Pierre Tardy about Buildbot, which is a Python framework for building and maintaining CI/CD workflows to keep our software projects on track.

Brief Introduction

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Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti

Today we are interviewing Pierre Tardy about the Buildbot continuous integration system.

Interview with Pierre Tardy

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris

For anyone who isn’t familiar with it can you explain what Buildbot is? – Tobias

What was the original inspiration for creating the project? – Tobias

How did you get involved in the project? – Tobias

Can you describe the internal architecture of Buildbot and outline how a typical workflow would look? – Tobias

There are a number of packages out on PyPI for doing subprocess invocation and control, in addition to the functions in the standard library. Which does buildbot use and why? – Chris

What makes Buildbot stand out from other CI/CD options that are available today? – Tobias

Scaling a large CI/CD system can become a challenge. What are some of the limiting factors in the Buildbot architecture and in what ways have you seen people work to overcome them? – Tobias

Are there any design or architecture choices that you would change in the project if you were to start it over? – Tobias

If you were starting from scratch on implementing buildbot today, would you still use Python? Why? – Chris

What are some of the most difficult challenges that have been faced in the creation and evolution of the project? – Tobias

What are some of the most notable uses of Buildbot and how do they uniquely leverage the capabilities of the framework? – Tobias

What are some of the biggest challenges that people face when beginning to implement Buildbot in their architecture? – Tobias

Does buildbot support the use of docker or public clouds as a part of the build process? – Chris

I know that the execution engine for Buildbot is written in Twisted. What benefits does that provide and how has that influenced any efforts for providing Python 3 support? – Tobias

Does buildbot support build parallelization at all? For instance splitting one very long test run up into 3 instances each running a section of tests to cut build time? – Chris

What are some of the most requested features for the project and are there any that would be unreasonably difficult to implement due to the current design of the project? – Tobias

Does buildbot offer a plugin system like Jenkins does, or is there some other approach it uses for custom extensions to the base buildbot functionality? – Chris

Managing a reliable build pipeline can be operationally challenging. What are some of the thorniest problems for Buildbot in this regard and what are some of the mechanisms that are built in to simplify the operational characteristics? – Tobias

What were some of the challenges around supporting slaves running on platforms with very different environmental characteristics like Microsoft Windows? – Chris