Introduction

According to Wikipedia, DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) with the goal of shortening the Systems Development Lifecycle, and providing continuous delivery with high software quality. This KB will provide some guidance for system deployment and configuration, which can be integrated into an organizations DevOps processes.

For more information on using MarkLogic as part of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery process, see the KB  Deployment and Continuous Integration Tools.

Deploying a Cluster

Deploying a MarkLogic cluster that will act as the target environment for the application code being developed is one piece of the DevOps puzzle. The approach that is chosen will depend on many things, including the tooling already in use by an organization, as well as the infrastructure that will be used for the deployment.  We will cover two of the most common environments, On-Premise and Cloud.

On-Premise Deployments

On-Premise deployments, which can include using bare metal servers, or Virtual Machine infrastructure (such as VMware), are one common environment. You can deploy a cluster to an on-premise environment using tools such as shell scripts, or Ansible. In the Scripting Administrative Tasks Guide, there is a section on Scripting Cluster Management, which provides some examples of how a cluster build can be automated.

Once the cluster is deployed, some of the specific configuration tasks that may need to be performed on the cluster can be done using the Management API.

Cloud Deployments

Cloud deployments utilize flexible compute resources provided by vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.

For AWS, MarkLogic provides an example CloudFormation template, that can be used to deploy a cluster to Amazon's AWS EC2 Environment. Tools like the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), Terraform or Ansible can be used to extend the MarkLogic CloudFormation template, and automate the process of creating a cluster in the AWS EC2 environment.  MarkLogic has provided an example , which can be utilized to . The template can be used to deploy a cluster using the AWS CLI. The template can also be used to Deploy a Cluster Using Terraform, or it can be used to Deploy a Cluster Using Ansible.

For Azure, MarkLogic has provided Solution Templates for Azure which can be extended for automated deployments using the Azure CLI, Terraform or Ansible.

As with the on-premise deployments, configuration tasks can be performed on the cluster using the Management API

Summary

This is just a brief introduction into some aspects of DevOps processes for deploying and configuring a MarkLogic Cluster.