DevOps

[roodrood]

I have found some resources on various blogs about creating LabVIEW images for docker, licensing labview inside a container, and copying VIPM installations into a container. It all seemed like a lot of manual work and i was wondering if NI is working on streamlining some of these steps and providing docker integration, maybe even DevOps support for GitLab maybe. I was wondering if it is worth spending the time to figure it all out or just wait until NI provides support for this.

[Jorr-El]

I'd say don't hold your breath for NI to release integrations with all the CI/CD tools you're going to want to use. I think most of us who use CI/CD tools have "gotten it working well enough" and basically maintained that level of automation. Personally, we use the Caraya unit testing toolkit and have automated pipeline builds, unit tests, and integration tests running on our own hosted Jenkins Server that's connected to our Bitbucket cloud repos, and that's good enough for us right now. 

Would containers, Kubernetes, GitLab DevOps be nice to have? Absolutely, but I doubt that's going to happen anytime in the near future. If you look at the LabVIEW 2022 Roadmap it doesn't really give that many details on what's being planned, but considering it took until LabVIEW 2021 for LabVIEW's Compare tool to natively support Git without using wrappers, I'm not super optimistic about getting full on DevOps support with modern tools within the next few years.

I've looked into creating LabVIEW images for Docker and trying to containerize a LabVIEW project, but in the end I decided it was more headache than it was worth. We spend what extra time we have maintaining our Jenkins automated build server nodes and that's about it. We'd like more, but it's not worth the amount of effort it would take to progress farther along the DevOps curve with LabVIEW's tools at this point.

[roodrood]

Thank you Jorr-El, this is very helpful info fr our decision making