CI at trivago

Make was created in 1976 by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs to help build C programs. But how can this 40+ year old piece of software help us develop and maintain our ever-growing amount of cloud-based microservices?

We do think that our tech blog is full of interesting things powered by our engineers' great stories. Let me take you on a journey of how we maintain the trivago tech blog from the technical perspective and how we recently automated its deployment process.

We're a data-driven company. At trivago we love measuring everything. Collecting metrics and making decisions based on them comes naturally to all our engineers. This workflow also applies to performance, which is key to succeed in the modern Internet.

When I joined trivago a year ago, we had problems with our releases. The traffic was increasing each day. When we put the server back into the load balancer without warming up the OPcache it would die. From time to time the warmup failed silently. Our DCO (data center operations) crew had to log into the servers and restart a few processes manually. During this time every release was very intense.

I love to take complex and tedious processes and automate the pain out of them until they are reduced to three or four steps!

Configuration management tools have recently gained a lot of popularity. At trivago we use SaltStack to automate our infrastructure. As the complexity of configuration files and formulas is increasing, we need a fast, reliable way to test our changes.