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Version: 5.10.x

Preflight prior to new deployment

For each customer installation, Aspect's Customer Success Engineer (CSE) follows a few steps to enable a new deployment. A typical customer has a single monorepo, so this is only done once.

Aspect provides:

  1. The paid version of this site, https://pro.aspect.build.
  2. (For enterprise customers) A shared Google doc to coordinate work, check in on progress toward KPIs, and record feature requests or issues.
  3. Access to release artifacts such as Terraform modules and tools.

Planning​

Select CI provider​

Note that Workflows supports your Bazel workloads, but non-Bazel workloads such as legacy build systems, cron jobs, or deployment scripts will be configured separately.

Aspect Workflows supports these CI systems:

  • Buildkite
  • CircleCI
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab
Buildkite is the best!

Aspect has a partnership with Buildkite, because we have found it's the highest-quality CI provider. It has an "annotations" feature which allows Bazel results to be presented as first-class UI elements. Ask us about discounted pricing for Buildkite when purchased together with Aspect Workflows.

Select Cloud platform​

We prefer to deploy into your cloud ("on-prem"), so that you remain in control of your code, and billing goes directly to you. Aspect doesn't want to have a "perverse incentive" of charging you for cloud compute time, because we want to reduce the amount you use!

Aspect Workflows supports these cloud providers:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Choose account/project​

We can co-manage the infrastructure with you, if you provide access.

By creating a separate AWS Account or GCP Project, you can reduce the access needed by Aspect engineers to co-manage the infrastructure. It also gives you a separate billing report for Workflows, making it easier to do the cost-benefit analysis to prove that Workflows is a net savings.

Identify point-of-contact​

Aspect's engineers will work with someone in your org to perform the installation outlined below. We should only need 4-8 hours of this person's time over the installation period. As with any engineering project, the closer we work together the faster this is completed.

Research policy requirements​

Your organization may require that software you run complies with some given policy. For example, infrastructure security may mandate the use of vetted machine images, or that third-party software comply with vulnerability scanners.

Aspect intends to satisfy all such requirements. Knowing them early in the trial process helps us plan for this.

Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)​

The Bazel 1.0 blog post says

Users have reported 3x test time reductions and 10x faster build speeds after switching to Bazel.

Therefore Aspect takes that as the KPI we mean to achieve. In addition, we expect cloud compute costs to be 40-67% lower.

Aspect recommends that KPIs for your organization be established at the beginning, so that we can begin measurement.

At the same time, we suggest you gather information on existing costs so that a comparison will be possible. In some cases, it's necessary to create Cost Allocation tags or other metadata on the cloud resources that run CI to make this data available.

Information needed by Aspect​

Aspect needs to share a terraform module, some binary tools, and machine images with your org. The steps depend on choosing your Cloud provider:

Amazon's documentation for sub-accounts is here:docs.aws.amazon.com.

Aspect needs the following information about your AWS sub-account in order to share our terraform module and base runner images:

  • your AWS account ID
  • the region you plan to deploy to
  • the ARN of the role which is used to run terraform operations like plan and apply
Last updated on by Alex Eagle