Building A Detailed View Of Your Software Delivery Process With The Eiffel Protocol

Summary

The process of getting software delivered to an environment where users can interact with it requires many steps along the way. In some cases the journey can require a large number of interdependent workflows that need to be orchestrated across technical and organizational boundaries, making it difficult to know what the current status is. Faced with such a complex delivery workflow the engineers at Ericsson created a message based protocol and accompanying tooling to let the various actors in the process provide information about the events that happened across the different stages. In this episode Daniel Ståhl and Magnus Bäck explain how the Eiffel protocol allows you to build a tooling agnostic visibility layer for your software delivery process, letting you answer all of your questions about what is happening between writing a line of code and your users executing it.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python’s role in data and science.

When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With the launch of their managed Kubernetes platform it’s easy to get started with the next generation of deployment and scaling, powered by the battle tested Linode platform, including simple pricing, node balancers, 40Gbit networking, dedicated CPU and GPU instances, and worldwide data centers. Go to pythonpodcast.com/linode and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!

Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Daniel Ståhl and Magnus Bäck about Eiffel, an open protocol for platform agnostic communication for CI/CD systems

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

Can you describe what Eiffel is and the story behind it?

What are the goals of the Eiffel protocol and ecosystem?

What is the role of Python in the Eiffel ecosystem?

What are some of the types of questions that someone might ask about their CI/CD workflow?

How does Eiffel help to answer those questions?

Who are the personas that you would expect to interact with an Eiffel system?

Can you describe the core architectural elements required to integrate Eiffel into the software lifecycle?

How have the design and goals of the Eiffel protocol/architecture changed or evolved since you first began working on it?

What are some example workflows that an engineering/product team might build with Eiffel?

What are some of the challenges that teams encounter when integrating Eiffel into their delivery process?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Eiffel used?

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Eiffel?

When is Eiffel the wrong choice?

What do you have planned for the future of Eiffel?

Keep In Touch

Daniel

d-stahl-ericsson on GitHub

LinkedIn

Magnus

LinkedIn

magnusbaeck on GitHub

Picks

Tobias

Red Notice

Daniel

The Witcher

Magnus

Lego

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management.

Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.

If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story.

To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Eiffel

Ericsson

Axis Communications

Hudson CI framework

Spinnaker

Jenkins

Tekton

Gradle

Artifactory

JSON Schema

RabbitMQ

Prometheus

Continuous Delivery Foundation

CD Events

XKCD Competing Standards

Python Eiffel SDK

Pydantic

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA