A ci-agnostic orchestrator for triggering tests on a shared environment pool across multiple pipelines.

At a certain scale, user acceptance and integration tests need to be run against live environments that are either mirrors of a production environment or scaled down mirrors of a production environment. Scheduling these tests can become complicated when they need to be triggered from multiple pipelines and repositories:

Push to Repo A -> Deploy to Test Environment -> Run Tests

Push to Repo B -> Deploy to Test Environment -> Run Tests

If the push to Repo B triggers a deployment and test run while the test run for Repo A is still in progress, there is a high likelihood that this will produce side effects on the tests running for Repo A and produce inaccurate results and false-failures.

If an unique test environment takes a short time to provision and destroy after every test, this would be the preferred way to handle such scenarios, but if the environment provisioning takes longer than is acceptable and is significantly detrimental to the development feedback loop, pre-provisioned environments become the more attractive alternative.

Pre-provisioned environments can be managed at a small scale with manual triggers and a bit of discipline, but this usually can't be maintained as the development team and number of repositories or projects grows.

call-me provides a RESTful API for managing slots and locks on pre-provisioned testing environments. Under the hood, call-me uses bbolt as a fast and reliable key/value store that is optimised for read-intensive workloads As bbolt uses an exclusive write lock on the database, this nicely handles the potential problem of multiple concurrent updates.

call-me exposes the following routes:

Checks if a slot on the desired environment is free.

If the slot is free:

curl -I -X GET 'http://call.me/maybe?environment=uat' -H 'X-API-KEY: E-MO-TION'

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:29:16 GMT
Content-Length: 0

If the slot is locked:

curl -I -X GET 'http://call.me/maybe?environment=uat' -H 'X-API-KEY: E-MO-TION'

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:31:16 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Requests a slot on the desired environment.

If the slot is free and given to the requester:

curl -I -X POST 'http://call.me/maybe?environment=uat' -H 'X-API-KEY: E-MO-TION'

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:29:44 GMT
Content-Length: 0

If the slot is locked at the time of the request:

curl -I -X POST 'http://call.me/maybe?environment=uat' -H 'X-API-KEY: E-MO-TION'

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:33:14 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Releases a slot on the specified environment.

Get the latest manifest for a specific hostname.

curl -I -X POST 'http://call.me/maybe?environment=uat' -H 'X-API-KEY: E-MO-TION'

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:35:39 GMT

The server takes two environment variables as configuration:

• PORT
• API_KEY

# docker
docker build -t call-me .
docker run -e PORT=8000 -e API_KEY=crj -p 8000:8000 call-me

# binary
GO111MODULE=on go install ./cmd/call-me-server
PORT=8000 API_KEY=crj call-me-server

The client requires two environment variables:

• HOST
• API_KEY

GO111MODULE=on go install ./cmd/call-me-client

export HOST=call-me-server:8000
export API_KEY=crj

Request a free slot:

# request a free slot
call-me-client request uat

acquired slot for environment: uat
waited 57.134996ms

Wait until a request is free and then lock the slot:

call-me-client request uat

waiting for free slot on environment: uat
waiting for free slot on environment: uat
acquired slot for environment: uat
waited 10.089027168s

Release a slot when finished:

call-me-client release uat

slot has been freed for environment: uat