SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa
The MeerKAT Control and Monitoring(CAM) solution is a mature software system that has undergone multiple phases of construction and expansion. It is a distributed system with a run-time environment of 15 logical nodes featuring dozens of interdependent, short-lived processes that interact with a number of long-running services. This presents a challenge for the development team to balance operational goals with continued discovery and development of useful enhancements for its users (astronomers, telescope operators). Continuous Delivery is a set of practices designed to always keep software in a releasable state. It employs the discipline of release engineering to optimise the process of taking changes from source control to production. In this paper, we review the current path to production (build, test and release) of CAM, identify shortcomings and introduce approaches to support further incremental development of the system. By implementing patterns such as deployment pipelines and immutable release candidates we hope to simplify the release process and demonstrate increased throughput of changes, quality and stability in the future
