François Ritaly - Workday (English Version)

1. Tracking Activity with Neo4j

2. • Build Engineer (Build Engineering Team)
• Located in Paris, France
• Responsibilities
‒ Development of reusable Gradle plugins
‒ Administration of Artifactory
‒ Development of custom tools
‒ Support to engineering teams (mainly build-related)
‒ Sentinel (Server to track activity)
Who Am I ?
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3. The Build Engineering Mission

4. • Define policies for engineering teams
(dependency locking, artifact promotion,
artifact metadata)
• Provide reusable tooling (Gradle plugins &
other custom tools)
• Administer shared services (Artifactory)
• Provide assistance to engineering teams
Build Engineering – Our mission
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5. • To ensure policies are followed
• Engineers enjoy a lot of freedom at Workday !
‒ Netflix: The Paved Road
• Is our tooling relevant ?
• Gain insight into how development teams are working
 We need answers to those questions !
Why We Need Monitoring
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6. • Artifacts (Jars, Rpms, “Deliveries”, etc)
• CI Builds (in Bamboo, Team City and Jenkins)
• SCM changes (in BitBucket, GitHub, Gerritt, etc)
• Dependencies (between Artifacts, Builds, etc)
• JIRA issues (tracking of code)
• Promotions (of artifacts)
• Metadata in general
We’re interested in …
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7. • No unified system of records with all this information !
• The data is scattered across different systems (AF, CI, JIRA…)
• … is secured with different credentials (AD, LDAP)
• … is stored under different formats (JSON, XML, CSV, etc)
• … is not always easily accessible
• Accessing one data source is (usually) easy
• Accessing two data sources is already a bit trickier
• No unified query language for joining the aggregated data
Problem: The Data is Everywhere
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8. Requirements

9. • Simple access to the information
• Unified and intuitive data model
• Powerful query language
• Data as accurate as possible
 Frequent updates to the data
 Updates must be fast (performance)
• Ability to easily refactor the data model
• Ability to expose this information to engineering teams (automation)
Requirements
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10. • We don’t want to rely on users to provide the information (unless we
have no other choice) !
• The information we need usually already exists or can be derived,
let’s use it !
But first of all !
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11. Sentinel – Architecture Overview

12. Architecture Overview
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REST API
Web UI
Data
Miner
…
JIRA
Artifactory
Bamboo
BitBucket
Data SourcesA foundation to solve current and future problems
Neo4j
Aggregation
Sanitization
Normalization

13. • Command line tool (written in Groovy)
• Executable fat jar
• Runs from Bamboo every 15 mins
• Scans the data sources containing the information we need
• Preemptively extracts, sanitizes & normalizes the data
• Detects incremental changes (optimized for performance)
• Crash-proof
• A run executes 59 commands in sequence
• Scan time: 8 mins (min), 23 mins (average)
The Data Miner
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14. • A (NoSQL) graph database
• Graph paradigm is good for our need
• Very flexible and easy to use
• Schema-less
• Excellent performance
• All the useful data in one place
• Cypher (Query Language) !
The Neo4j Database
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15. • UI made of HTML dashboards & dynamic charts
• REST API
• Spring Boot, Thymeleaf, D3.js, Swagger
The Services We Expose
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16. Neo4j in a Nutshell

17. • Nodes have properties (Comparable to a Map<String, ?>)
• … can have 0-N labels (Typing, Polymorphism)
Neo4j - Nodes
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core
1.0.5 jar
Artifact ArtifactoryFile Workday id com.workday:core
group com.workday
artifact core
version 1.0.5
created 1458713182201

18. • Relationships represent an edge between 2 nodes
• … have a name
• … can be directed
• … can have properties
Neo4j - Relationships
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Artifact
core
1.0.5 jar
Git Commit
core
5ce1f767
HAS_COMMIT

19. Neo4j query language
A node ()
A labeled node (:Person)
A relationship between 2 nodes ()--()
A directed labeled relationship ()-[:PARENT_OF]->()
MATCH (parent:Person)-[:PARENT_OF]->(child:Person)
RETURN parent.name, COLLECT(child.name)
Neo4j - Cypher
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20. Extracting the Data

21. Everything Starts with Artifactory
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• Official repository of Artifacts, Rpms, Docker images
• REST API to detect new artifacts in repositories

22. Step 1: Artifacts
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• URI: com/workday/core/1.0.5/core-1.0.5-javadoc.jar
 Group com.workday
 Module core
 Version 1.0.5
 Type jar
 Classifier javadoc
 ID: “com.workday:core:1.0.5:javadoc@jar”
Artifact
core 1.0.5 jar
javadoc

23. Step 2: Module Versions
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• The artifact relates to a “Module Version”
 Group com.workday
 Module core
 Version 1.0.5
 ID: “com.workday:core:1.0.5”
ModuleVersion
core 1.0.5

24. Step 3: Modules
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• The module version relates to a “Module”
 Group com.workday
 Module core
 ID: “com.workday:core”
Module
core

25. All Together With Relationships
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Module
coreArtifact
jar
Artifact
javadoc
jar
Artifact
sources
jar
ARTIFACT_OF
Artifact
jar
Artifact
javadoc
jar
Artifact
sources
jar
ARTIFACT_OF
Version
1.0.5
Version
1.0.7
VERSION_OF VERSION_OF
Version
1.0.6

26. Step 4: Artifact Dependencies
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• Maven / Ivy descriptors  Dependencies
• Dependencies  DEPENDS_ON relationships
services
2.0.0
DEPENDS_ON
gson
2.2.2
core
1.0.5
DEPENDS_ON

27. Step 5: Artifact Metadata
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• Populated at build time (by a custom Gradle plugin)
• Captures information about
‒ Gradle, JDK, Build machine
‒ CI builds
‒ SCM changes
• Makes artifacts “self-documented”

28. Manifest Metadata – SCM Info
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• WD-Git-Origin ssh://git@bitbucket.acme.com/core/core.git
• WD-Git-Commit e28a60b96f452680c57cb76798def09fd171011f
Artifact
core
1.0.5 jar
Git Commit
core
e28a60…
HAS_COMMIT

29. Concrete Examples

30. List of all Workday Artifacts
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Group Module Latest
Version
Age
(days)
SCM url SCM
change
Build
URL
Latest
JIRAs
com.workday core 1.0.5 120.2 core.git e28a60b9 URL CORE-120
com.workday foo-services 1.3.0 29.1 foo-services.git 146ae135 URL FOO-57
com.workday bar-services 2.2.8 54.8 bar-services.git b538c156 URL BAR-70
… … … … … … … …
Public dashboard accessible with latest information (automatically up-to-date)
→ Where’s the build of this jar file ?
→ Where are the sources for this jar file ?

31. Identifying Direct Dependents
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MATCH (dependent:ModuleVersion)-[:DEPENDS_ON]->(dependency:ModuleVersion)
WHERE dependency.id = "com.workday:core:1.0.5”
RETURN dependent.id AS dependent
 Service in the Sentinel REST API
Dependent
com.workday:foo-
services:1.3.0
com.workday:foo-
services:1.2.5
com.workday:bar-
services:2.2.8
com.workday:bar-
services:2.2.7
…

32. Build Orchestration
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Producing build Consuming build
Bamboo Build
CORE
BUILT
Artifact
core 1.0.5
jar
ModuleVersion
core 1.0.5
ARTIFACT_OF
ModuleVersion
foo-services 1.3.0
ARTIFACT_OF
Bamboo Build
FOO-SERVICES
Artifact
foo-services 1.3.0
jar
BUILT
DEPENDS_ON
DEPENDS_ON

33. Automated Release Notes
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Version 1 Version 2
Bamboo Build
CORE #11
BUILT
Artifact
core v1
jar
Git Commit
core
5ce1f767
HAS_REVISION
Git Commit
core
ee2a0e22
HAS_REVISION
Bamboo Build
CORE #12
Artifact
core v2
Jar
BUILT
PARENT_REVISION
JIRA Issue
CORE-120
LINKS_TO

34. Identify SCM Changes per JIRA
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Find all mentions of a JIRA in commit messages
Input: JIRA issue
Output: Set of SCM changes
JIRA Issue
CORE-120
Git Commit
core
5ce1f767
Git Commit
core
5954ff88
Git Commit
core
ee2a0e22

35. Rule: “No dynamic dependencies in Maven / Ivy files”
Rationale: Builds must be reproducible
Dynamic versions: 1.+, LATEST, [1.0, 2.0[
Detection of Rule Violations
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HTML dashboard listing the latest violations
ModuleVersion
baz 4.2.10
ModuleVersion
pmd-checks
1.+
DEPENDS_ON

36. Conclusion
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• Service rolled out internally
• Neo4j is the perfect tool for capturing the data we’re interested in
‒ Very easy to refactor / enrich the data
• Cypher gives us insight from the aggregated data
• Solid foundation for future services
‒ Difficult part: Capturing the data
‒ Easy part: Leveraging the data by creating new queries
• Decisions based on facts, not (educated) guesses
• Holistic reporting

37. Q & A
Thanks for attending
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38. TM