Automating Code Upgrades in Spryker CI
Spryker is the leading composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models to enable growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed specifically for sophisticated transactional business, Spryker’s easy-to-use, headless, API-first model offers a best-of-breed approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value throughout their digital transformation journey.
Upgrades are often disregarded to avoid the immediate cost and manual effort. In addition, new upgrades must be tested with any custom implementation to prevent breaking the software. This would result in missing security patches and potentially even new features.
Furthermore, the customer might undertake code changes that are not compliant with Spryker’s ecosystem, which could lead to technical debts in future maintenance.
In other cases, some customers using the Spryker Cloud service had little understanding of the CI/CD process of their application. This led to customers having to ask the Spryker operations team for information on when a fix could take place.
The Solution
Customers can utilize Spryker PaaS+ and Spryker Code Upgrader to enable a semi-automatic and seamless process for continuous upgrades in Spryker Cloud. This process covers the end-to-end flow, starting from the code being pushed to a repository via Git, right up until it is deployed with AWS code pipeline.
To achieve this, each customer receives pre-defined CI/CD pipelines placed in their dedicated workspace. Workspaces are powered by Buddy, a managed solution that provides a UI for building CI/CD pipelines and comes with many actions.
The workspace contains a pipeline with one step: Spryker Code Upgrader runs every week per default, but this can be configured according to customer needs. If an upgrade is available, it will create a Pull Request (PR) on Github or Merge Request (MR) on Gitlab. The user only needs to approve these, should they wish. There is also an available feature to auto-approve every PR and MR without requiring user interaction.
The whole Spryker CI integration is written in Terraform.
Results and Benefits
Customers cannot enjoy an authentic platform experience until platforms provide true enablement for DevOps automation. Spryker’s PaaS+ seeks to provide automated CI/CD workflows that enable customers to continuously integrate and deploy their Spryker containerized solutions.
Instead of connecting their repositories directly to the provided AWS CodePipelines, Spryker customers can now, in a self-service manner, deploy their application via Spryker CI.
This solution provides:
- A great DX/UX.
- Visibility and control over CI/CD jobs.
- CI capabilities as the customer’s code is checked against Spryker best practices and PaaS compatibility.
Spryker CI and Spryker Code Upgrader have enabled Spryker customers to be more proactive in their work, minimizing their need to contact Spryker engineers. This results in reduced upgrade and maintenance efforts, enabling easier adoption of new releases or fixes.
About PCG
Public Cloud Group (PCG) supports companies in their digital transformation through the use of public cloud solutions.
With a product portfolio designed to accompany organizations of all sizes in their cloud journey and competence that is a synonym for highly qualified staff that clients and partners like to work with, PCG is positioned as a reliable and trustworthy partner for the hyperscalers, relevant and with repeatedly validated competence and credibility.
We have the highest partnership status with the three relevant hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. As experienced providers, we advise our customers independently with cloud implementation, application development, and managed services.
