Servers for Everyone: Review Apps @ Artsy

By Daniel Levenson

This blog post is going to motivate and describe Artsy’s adoption and evolution of the usage of review apps.

This first part of this post covers a couple of common problems where topic-specific servers (i.e. review apps) are useful.

The rest of the post describes Artsy’s history with review app automation via incremental problem solving and the composition of a few well-known technologies.

Problem 1.0: A Single Shared Staging Environment

At Artsy, we have a sizable engineering organization: ~40 engineers organized across many teams. Engineers on those teams work on many codebases, some are exclusive to a team, but many codebases are worked on by engineers across many teams. Artsy’s website (www.artsy.net), Force, is a good example of such a shared service.

These different teams of developers working on a shared service have (mostly hidden) dependencies upon each other, most visible when a shared service is being deployed to production.

Let’s work the following example:

  • Team A is hard at work finishing up a new feature (say a new search page for a list of art auctions) on Service S and is now doing a final round of QA before deploying to production
  • Team B is fixing a bug in an unrelated part of Service S
  • Team B confirms that the bug was squashed on staging
  • Team B deploys Service S to production

Artsy’s production deployment flow is rooted in a GitHub Pull Request, meaning that the commits that differ between staging (on the staging Git branch) and production (on the release Git branch) are clear to whomever is managing a deploy (example).

While it’s great that our deploys are easy to understand, ensuring that a deploy of a service is safe requires communicating with the teams that contributed code to ensure that their work is “safe to deploy”.

“Safe to deploy” might mean different things depending on the nature of the work.

For example, Team A’s new list of art auctions might require an API endpoint in another Service Z to be deployed for their part of the deploy of Service S to be safe to deploy. Team B’s bugfix might just requires a quick visual confirmation.

Suffice to say, it’s hard to independently confirm that another team’s work is safe to deploy.

Despite the mitigation strategies discussed next, there’s risk of deploying unsafe code whenever a single staging environment is used across many teams.

Shared Staging Mitigation Strategies

There are a couple of ways Artsy mitigates against the possible pitfalls of a shared staging environment:

  1. Having a culture of quickly deploying code to production

    By building a culture that views frequent deploys positively, there’s, on average, less diff in every deploy, mitigating the risk of unintentionally deploying code that’s not safe to deploy.

  2. Using automated quality processes geared towards a stable staging environment

    We do our best to feel as confident as possible in a change before it is deployed to staging by creating automated tests for changes, sharing visual changes over Slack and in PRs, and other strategies relevant to the work at hand.

  3. Communicating deploys

    When deploying a service, Artsy engineers typically send a message to our #dev Slack channel notifying of their plan to deploy a particular service, cc’ing the engineers that are involved in other PRs that are part of the deploy. In the example above, an engineer on Team B would notify relevant stakeholders of Team A, giving that team the opportunity to flag if their work is not yet safe to deploy.

While these strategies are impactful:

  • Semi-unstructured communication is prone to breakdown: the notified engineers on Team A might be pairing or in a meeting and Team B deploys anyways.

  • Without a true continuous delivery model, it’s a challenge to operationalize very frequent production deploys. Moreover, the problem compounds as the team grows and the velocity of work increases.

  • Particularly when working in a large distributed system, automated testing at the individual service level can only provide a certain level of safety for a change. Visual changes which require correctness on different viewports and devices are, pragmatically, often best to test manually.

If only there was a way to allow Team A and B to work without risking stepping on each other toes!

We’ll discuss how review apps provide this safety, but first another related problem.

Problem 2.0: Complex Work Needs Many Eyes

But before it gets better, it’s going to get a bit worse.

While working on any mature distributed system is a challenge, some work is particularly challenging or risky. Generally, risk is reduced when many skilled eyes can review the risky thing in an environment that closely mimics the production environment.

This class of work might include changes to authorization flows, page redesigns or infrastructural upgrades (e.g. a NodeJS upgrade).

For example, to feel safe deploying a major version upgrade of Artsy’s design system in Force the most pragmatic way forward was to deploy that PR to a server where other engineers could collaborate on QA.

If a single shared staging environment is the only non-production server to deploy to, the chances that work lands on staging in an unsafe state is high. While staging being unsafe isn’t itself a bad thing, many bad things can result:

  1. [Bad] Blocked Deploys

    If staging is unsafe and this dangerous state is discovered, then top priority is getting a service back into a safe state. While working to get a service back to a healthy state, new features can’t be delivered.

    In aggregate, this can be a sizeable productivity loss.

  2. [Worse] Unsafe Deploys

    If staging is unsafe and this dangerous state is not discovered before a production deploy (for example, the unsafe code might be from another team, as described above), then end-users might interact with a service that just isn’t working. No good.

  3. [Terrible] Fear

    Fear is the mind-killer. Dune

    Alright, a bit over the top, but the risk of unsafe or blocked deploys can implicitly or explicitly result in teams shying away from complex work.

    This avoidable fear might result in increased technical debt or not taking on certain projects.

    It’s generally bad for business and does not lead to a pleasant work environment!

Problem Recap & Review App Introduction

To recap, there is an increased risk of unsafe or blocked deploys whenever there is a single staging environment for a shared service. Certain types of (incredibly useful) changes require interactive review on a live server before we feel comfortable with those changes, which magnifies the risk of a unsafe or blocked deploy.

Review apps are simply other staging environments that are easy to spin up and are deployed with the version of the service that you are working on.

By QA-ing on a review app instead of a shared staging environment, teams can take their time ensuring the safety of their changes, removing the risks detailed above.

Larger infrastructure upgrades (including upgrades to the underlying K8s configuration, in addition to app-level changes) can sit on a server for hours or days, allowing any slow-moving issue to show itself in a lower risk environment.

Artsy has iterated on its review app tooling to the point where Team A and Team B can each deploy their changes to isolated servers of our main website, Force, on a single git push to a branch matching a naming convention.

The rest of this post describes Artsy’s evolution of its review app tooling and areas for continued improvement.

Review App Tooling

Heroku Days

In the beginning, Artsy deployed most services on Heroku. There were fewer engineers and teams, so the engineering organization was less impacted by the problems described above.

Heroku review apps were used on some teams sparingly.

Enter Kubernetes and Hokusai

For many reasons outside of the scope of this post, Artsy began migrating services off of Heroku and onto an AWS-backed Kubernetes (K8s) deployment model starting in February 2017.

In order to allow application engineers to reasonably interface with K8s-backed services, Artsy developed a command line interface, hokusai, to provide a Heroku CLI-like interface for configuring and deploying these services.

Check out some prior posts discussing the experience of working with Kubernetes and hokusai.

About a year after hokusai’s initial release, the tool released its initial support for review apps.

Via subcommands within the hokusai review_app namespace, developers were able to:

  • Create the needed K8s YAML configuration file from an existing staging configuration file
  • Execute this configuration: creating a running server within a dedicated namespace
  • Perform other server management tasks: re-deploying to the server, setting ENV variables, etc

Problem: More Steps Needed

While hokusai’s official review app feature handles much of the core infrastructure needed to get a service deployed to a new server, additional tasks are required to have a working review app, which can be categorized into:

  1. Service Agnostic Tasks

    These include:

    • Pushing a Docker image of the Git revision in question to the appropriate Docker registry
    • Editing the generated YAML configuration file to reference this Docker image
    • Sourcing the appropriate ENV variables (typically from the shared staging server)

    Check out hokusai’s review app docs for more details.

  2. Service Specific Tasks

    In addition, certain services have service-specific operational requirements that need to be met before a review app is fully functional.

    For example, in Force, we need to:

    • Publish front-end assets to S3 for the specific revision being deployed, and
    • Tweak some ENV variables from the values copied over from the shared staging server

Impact: Due to the manual labor required to (re)-learn and execute the commands needed to build a review app, they were used sparingly by a few engineers that already invested time in learning up on them.

Solution: A bash script

While these tasks described above are tedious, they don’t really require a decision-making human behind the computer and can be automated.

In August 2019, we automated these tasks via a Bash script.

Impact: A developer is able take a Force commit and get it deployed to K8s by running a single script on their laptop. Folks became excited about review apps and started to use them more for Force development.

Problem: Depending upon a developer’s laptop doesn’t scale

The increased excitement and usage of review apps in Force revealed a new problem:

Building and pushing >2 GB Docker image across home WiFi networks can be incredibly slow, decreasing the usefulness and adoption of the Bash script.

Solution: Run the bash script on CI

After discussions within Artsy’s Platform Practice, a possible solution emerged: build the review app by running this Bash script on CircleCI upon push to a branch starting with review-app.

This means that a developer’s laptop is then only responsible for pushing a commit to a branch and CircleCI does all the heavy lifting.

Moreover, the process of centralizing the review app creation into CI helped us realize the subsequent requirement: updating, not creating, review apps when a review app already exists for a given branch.

Check out the pull request for the nitty gritty on how we leveraged CircleCI branch filtering and more Bash to move this workload into CircleCI and intelligently determine when to update or create a review app.

Impact: Any developer can spin up a Force review app in ~15 minutes on a git push. Review app are being used often for major and minor changes alike.

Future Iterations

Artsy has come far with its tooling for review applications, but, as always, there’s areas for us for to grow in, including:

  1. Automating the de-provisioning of review apps that no longer useful.

  2. Automating the creation of DNS CNAME records within Cloudflare, removing one final manual step.

  3. While the improvements to review app infrastructure has sparked similar investments in other codebases, there’s a lot of work we could do to bring this Git-CircleCI-Bash based approach to other shared services we deploy at Artsy.

On Incremental Improvement

One of Artsy’s Engineering Principles is “Incremental Revolution”, which begins with:

Introduce new technologies slowly and incrementally.

I think Artsy’s approach to review apps is a great example of this principle implemented.

As opposed to finding a silver bullet technology or strategy, our approach has been to build off of a working current state, layering on a new component to solve the next problem.

At each point along our solution journey, we’re left with a working and more valuable solution to the problem at hand.

Thanks for reading!