On Continuous Integration testing for Nova DB
To quote Homer Simpson: "All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.". One of my more recent goals is a desire to have real continuous integration testing for database migrations in Nova. You see, at the moment, database migrations can easily make upgrades painful for deployers, normally by taking a very long time to run. This is partially because we test on trivial datasets on our laptops, but it is also because it is hard to predict the scale of the various dimensions in the database -- for example: perhaps one deployment has lots of instances; whilst another might have a smaller number of instances but a very large number of IP addresses. The team I work with at Rackspace Australia has therefore been cooking up a scheme to try and fix this. For example, Josh Hesketh has been working on what we call Turbo Hipster, which he has blogged about. We've started off with a prototype to prove we can get meaningful testing results, which is running now. Since we finished the prototype we've been working on a real implementation, which is known as Turbo Hipster. I know it's an odd name, but we couldn't…