Hudson Survey Results Show Reliability and Performance Are Key Concerns
Earlier this year Sonatype and Oracle sponsored a Hudson user survey to gather input from the community about the future of Hudson. We want to thank everyone who participated (over 1200 people from a variety of industries) as this type of survey is extremely valuable to our product team. The survey was a huge success in that regard as it clearly points out both the popularity of Hudson as well as some key areas for improvement.
One of the most striking findings is that while our earlier Software Development Infrastructure Survey showed that Hudson is the clear Java CI market leader (over 70% of those using CI), the vast majority consider “stability” and “performance” to be the most critical “features” that need to be added (see figure 1). This feedback rings true to us as Hudson runs at the core of our development efforts, supporting our work on Apache Maven, Nexus, Guice, and other core open source and proprietary work. The product works well, but we have identified and solved a number of bugs that can cause performance and stability problems in Hudson. This experience seems to match closely that of Hudson users, both as indicated by the survey and through direct discussions and feedback. That is why our development team, in cooperation with Oracle and the larger Hudson developer community, has spent a lot of time working on performance and stability improvements and has donated those improvements back to the open source Hudson project (soon to be at the Eclipse Foundation) for all to benefit.
Last Chance to Enroll: MVN-101 Training in Europe
We are offering one last virtual Maven Mechanics (MVN-101) training course for European business hours in June. This will be our last virtual class in CEST for the summer. Be sure to enroll today!
Course details:
- Course: Maven Mechanics (MVN-101)
- Date: Tuesday June 14, 2011
- Time: 9:00AM – 4:00PM CEST (UTC/GMT + 0200) *European Hours
- Enrollment Fee: $595 USD (~425 EUR)
Maven Mechanics (MVN-101) is the ideal course for programmers who work with Apache Maven projects and need to understand how to work with an existing Maven build. If your team is just delving into Maven and Nexus, this class is the easiest way to make sure that everyone starts from the same foundation. This class is also appropriate for the existing Maven user who is interested in developing a greater understanding of the Maven fundamentals. Learn more here.
You will leave this Maven tutorial equipped with a full understanding of the Maven Project Object Model (POM) and a firm grasp of the underlying fundamentals of this development kit including:
- The Maven lifecycle
- Maven plugins and goals
- Multi-module Maven projects
- The contents of the Project Object Model (POM)
Sonatype donates Maven 3.x integration, Eclipse Integration to Hudson
We’re very excited about the proposed move of Hudson to the Eclipse foundation. To get the project off the right start in its new home, Sonatype has committed to donating all our Maven 3.x related work to the Hudson project. This includes the Maven 3.x integration for Hudson itself, our Eclipse integration, and our Maven Shell integration.
To start the process of donating our Maven 3.x related work we are inviting everyone to an informal webinar where we’ll walk through and demonstrate the complete Maven 3.x feature set of the Hudson integration. We’ll field any questions, listen to feedback and record the session so that anyone may use the recording as a reference for the Maven 3.x feature set. Everyone is welcome!
The specific features of the Maven 3.x builder for Hudson we’ll be talking about at this webinar is as follows:
Configuration Features
- Maven installations
- Global configuration templates
- Settings and toolchains configuration upload and builder selection
- Maven 3.x builder configuration
Build Comprehension Features
- Basic summary: goals, module list with status, name, duration
- Runtime details
- Module details: active profiles, produced artifacts, consumed artifacts
- Artifact details for the entire build
Advanced Features
- Auto archiving of artifacts
- Auto fingerprinting of artifacts
- Up/downstream triggers
We will also talk about how we integrated GWT, some of the benefits and drawbacks, and whether we think it’s a viable technology for Hudson. We have also created 10 new plugins and we’ll talk about some of those. Again, the webinar is going to be very informal, we really want feedback and questions from users in the Hudson community.
Webinar Details
Webex link: Community demo for proposed Maven 3.x support in Hudson
Date: Wednesday May 11th, 10:30AM-12:00PM EDT (GMT – 04:00)
Maven Central Failover Mechanism Improves: Temporary IP change on Monday
Spoiler Alert! This post contains information about a change to Maven Central’s IP addresses. If your network has firewall rules in place that need specific IPs, be sure to read this post.
We’re working hard and investing continued effort into making sure that Central is as available as possible. As Maven Central supports a world of developers, even a few minutes of downtime is completely unacceptable to us. In line with our previous efforts to make Maven Central as bullet-proof and available as possible, we are planning to make the US repository even more fault tolerant using a tool called Pacemaker. Once we’ve had time to evaluate the impact of the changes described in this post we will deploy similar measure for our European Union and Asia/Pacific mirrors.
As a follow up to our previous enhancements to central, we are planning to make the Maven Central US repository even more fault tolerant.
The US repository runs on two virtual machines (VMs) in a VMWare cluster with 4 physical nodes configured to use the High Availability support in VMWare. Despite having multiple levels of fault-tolerance, recovery from a misconfiguration or other catastrophic failure still requires a DNS update to a standby IP to restore Maven Central. This DNS change requires time: time to make the change and then an often unpredictable time for DNS changes to propagate over the entire Internet.
This is unacceptable to us. Millions of developers depend on Maven Central, we’ve invested in redundant virtual machines running on redundant physical hardware. If there is an unforeseen event, the problem should be addressed in a few seconds.
To achieve immediate failover in the event of failure we will be using a tool called Pacemaker to manage Maven Central’s floating IP cluster. Pacemaker monitors the repository IP address, Nginx process status, and sample content from Maven Central. If Pacemaker identifies a failure in any one of these components it will immediately failover to the backup machine. In my testing, this takes about 3-5 seconds to occur.
In a previous post I discussed the systems we have in place and how the IPs are configured:
We are aware that some users have firewall rules that are locked to the external service IP. Because of this, we strive to maintain a consistent IP for each system, however the primary mechanism for accessing the repository is by DNS for most users. At times, our failover escalation or maintenance procedures may require us to redirect the DNS for one system to another. For this reason, if you have firewall rules in place that need specific IPs, please allow this list so that you won’t be affected by any temporary transitions:
- 207.223.240.88 : US primary
- 207.223.240.92 : US staging / standby
- 89.167.251.252: UK Primary
- 89.167.251.253: UK standby
Maven 3: The Future of Enterprise Java Build Infrastructure
The Maven 3: The Future of Enterprise Java Build Infrastructure presentation is now available for viewing. This presentation was given at EclipseCon 2011 by Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl.
More on this presentation:
Maven 3 is the best version of Maven yet. Maven 3 is faster, has been optimized for IDE use, and is fully backward compatible with Maven 2. One of the big focuses of Maven 3 is to provide a more reliable, more stable and better performing build tool. Faster Maven builds lead to higher developer productivity in your organization.
Watch the video below:
