Automation at the Edge
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This document discusses automating Content Delivery Network (CDN) management through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. It recommends treating CDN configurations as code artifacts and including the CDN in the automated testing lifecycle. This allows the CDN to adhere to the same standards as other code artifacts and assets. It also minimizes manual steps required to deploy to production. The document provides considerations for implementing CDN CI/CD pipelines and presents a case study of a sample CDN delivery pipeline.
Automation at the Edge
- 1. Automation at the Edge CI/CD Pipelines for Content Delivery Networks
- 2. Introduction Duncan McAllister Accelerate our customer's business through a partnership focused on expertise, innovation, and education. Akamai Global Consulting Services
- 3. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Caching Network Acceleration Content Targeting Security
- 4. Content Delivery – more than caching… Application Load Balancing Multivariate Testing Feature Toggles Content Assembly
- 5. Who interfaces with the CDN? Developers Network Engineers QA Security Sales and Marketing
- 6. Leverage CDN Features Faster With enough handoffs, the work can completely loose the context of the problem being solved or the organizational goal being supported.” “ Velocity of CDN releases need to keep pace with everything else CDN integrated environments should be easily obtainable Fast feedback to enable small incremental versions Quick roll-back and issue reproducibility is key to promote solution stability
- 7. Solution – Automate CDN Management Treat CDN configurations as artifacts Include CDN in the automated testing lifecycle CDN should adhere to the same standards as other artifacts and assets (CI) Eliminate / Minimize manual steps required to deploy to production (CD)
- 8. CDN CI/CD Considerations Security – Certificates and Secrets management Operational – Deployment, Traffic Management, Cache management Provisioning – self-service / ephemeral environments Testing – TTLs, Behaviors, Content
- 9. CI Toolkit Client and Signing Libraries APIs Custom Behaviors Akamai CLI Property Manager API Faster Activations
- 10. Spectrum of CDN Management Maintain via Abstraction Develop Interactively Edit raw data Higher emphasis on static code analysis Reduced portability across providers Highest LOE / Complexity CDN agnostic (load balancing) Lowest common denominator features CDN Managed Easiest to adopt GUI Supported Limited / No Portability Mostly manual
- 11. CDN Management Common Automation Use Cases Configuration Security Operations
- 12. API vs CLI Enables granular modification of Property Manager Behaviors Cloudlet policy adjustments Higher development overhead Useful for operational tasks (provision, activate, retrieve) Package management inherits new API features Low learning curve API CLI
- 14. CDN Pipeline Case Study
- 15. CDN Delivery Pipeline Provision, Deploy, Activate processes are accomplished using the CLI CDN features are introduced via the Property Manager UI / PAPI VCS becomes the source of truth for CDN logic (metadata) Merge event triggers deployment pipeline
- 17. CDN Feature Testing HTTP Headers are inspected to validate Edge features Validate object TTL assignment, response codes Analyze session debug headers to determine proper behaviors are being applied Additional response attributes to consider: content encoding, protocol version, security policy
- 18. CI Defined Logic is implemented in a GOLD dev Property Manager Instance All changes are captured and tested within a short-lived feature branch. Ephemeral Environment used to deploy and test the feature branch artifact. Platform warnings/errors are captured and used to fail validation pipeline if encountered.
- 19. Externalize Configuration Environment Origin Feature Flags ACLs Delivery Configuration Environment Specific Variables
- 21. Avoid Monolithic Configurations Difficult to manage and troubleshoot Must reconcile features at different development stages across multiple match conditions Environment specific features could break other upstream/downstream environments
- 22. Avoid Snowflakes Undermines efforts to maintain a global configuration state Issues are rarely reproducible, compounding the impact and time to resolve stability issues Environment specific features could break other upstream/downstream environments
- 23. Test CDN Early in the SDLC ”The earlier we find problems, the cheaper it is to fix them!” Early stage CI test suites should complete quickly New property validation service for static code analysis
- 24. Integrate with CMS Ensure content invalidation is timely and surgical Invalidation can be performed via API and CLI FastPurge is supported natively!
- 25. Monitor Traffic, Offload, and Errors Understand the impact features have on user behavior and business KPIs Analyze data from RUM (mPulse) and synthetic (WPT) sources Consider these measurements when shaping CDN feature backlog or roadmap
- 26. Register for our Developer Program1 Learn about new use capabilities2 Tweet feedback @akamaidev3 developer.akamai.com/devops AKAMAI’S ONE STOP SHOP FOR EVERYTHING DEVOPS
- 27. ThankYou
- 28. Property Manager PAPI / CLI Akamai Trigger Provision Test Actiate Create Gold Config Create Dev/QA Config Push Prod config Done! Pipeline Tools Branch Pull Merge
- 29. Sample Jenkins Pipeline Source: https://gcs.akshayranganath.com/user/akrangan/my-views/view/My%20Pipeline/