Scaled Maintenance
Alright guys, here is a (maybe) super weird idea!
Imagine you have this one code change and you need to roll it out to 10 projects.
Workflow:
Checkout Project, do changes, test, mr, wait for approval, deploy
Checkout Project, do changes, test, mr, wait for approval, deploy
Checkout Project, do changes, test, mr, wait for approval, deploy
Checkout Project, do changes, test, mr, wait for approval, deploy
And so on...
So now, for example, there is the change that you want to remove the line with deprecated_feature
in all values.yaml files.
In Bash, it would look like this:
find . -type f -name "values.yaml" | while IFS= read -r file; do
# Remove the line containing 'deprecated_feature' and save the changes
sed -i '/deprecated_feature/d' "$file"
echo "Removed 'deprecated_feature' line from $file"
done
Now you could go into every Project execute the script and be done therefore "do changes" is faster, still have to Checkout Project, test, mr, wait for approval, deploy hmm...
Then maybe you could do it through a pipeline:
# .gitlab-ci.yml
stages:
- apply_changes
apply_changes:
stage: apply_changes
script:
- for project in <project_1_repo_url> <project_2_repo_url> <project_3_repo_url>; do
# Clone project repository
git clone $project project_repo
# Navigate to project repository directory
cd project_repo
git checkout -b my_automatic_change
find . -type f -name "values.yaml" | while IFS= read -r file; do
# Remove the line containing 'deprecated_feature' and save the changes
sed -i '/deprecated_feature/d' "$file"
echo "Removed 'deprecated_feature' line from $file"
done
# Push changes to project repository
git push origin my_automatic_change
# Create MR
sh createMr.sh
done
Coolio, so now only test (tbh still checkout), wait for approval, deploy remains.
But now the crazy idea!
Above Bash Script is created, as you can imagine, with ChatGPT.
So why not build a pipeline that can be given a list of instructions and it prepares them "smartly".
Something like:
- Upgrade the package
MyPackage
to Version 42. - In every
Startup.cs
, add the parametertypeof(MyAwesomeJobParameters)
toservices.addJobParameters
. - In the Configure method in Startup.cs, add the line
services.AddMyAwesomeJob();
Now the Pipeline could call a Generative AI with the instruction list in each projects context and let it generate the changes, create the MR. All the Dev would have to do is review the changes and maybe test the execution, if unit tests are not sufficient.
The whole thing sounds like a fantasy, but I guess it's not anymore.
If one would implement this, there would be a whole lot of potential pitfalls, trust issues and so on, but I think for this specific scenario it would enable Devs to less busy work and focus more on bringing cool features to the customers.