RSpec: GitHub to Jenkins to Spot Instance Parallelization and Back Again
summary
Pipeline wires GitHub PRs through the ghprb pull request builder into a parameterized build flow plugin job that shards RSpec files across 25 parallel spec-runner jobs, boots ec2 spot instances from an AMI via the ec2 plugin, runs isolated DB-backed tests, then collects results with Groovy/scripler glue and posts status back to GitHub. Turnaround drops from ~90 minutes to ~7–8 minutes, cost falls dramatically, and gotchas include spot terminations, a “spotpocalypse” risk, and 1–2 minute DB setup overhead that limits further scaling.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:35Unit Tests
- 3:01Continuous Unit Tests
- 3:13Parallel Tests
- 3:34cruft
- 4:09paralyze
- 4:44GitHub to Jenkins
- 5:17Move Jenkins
- 5:30Build Flow Plugin
- 6:39SpecRunner Plugin
- 7:37Parallelization
- 7:56AWS
- 8:25Spot Instances
- 13:14Build Executors
- 14:16Build Flow
- 14:37Groovy Bug
- 15:41Test Run
- 16:09Placement Server Events
- 16:30GitHub Pull Request Builder
- 16:46Lessons Learned
- 19:47Things That Made This Work
- 20:17ScriptLer
- 21:28Conclusion
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