January 2020 Summaries

Humanitec implemented social authentication with GitHub on their Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to provide users with a one-click experience, making it easier for them to access the application. Social authentication offers several benefits, including increasing registrations, making authentication easier, and automating email verification. The implementation faced challenges, such as parallel test runs using the same user, security verifications, and controlling the state of GitHub users and organizations. To overcome these challenges, Humanitec used test automation to continuously verify the implementation of social authentication. Test automation allows developers to run multiple tests per day without human error, providing fast and concise feedback, which is essential for supporting developers in a rapidly changing environment.

A large number of services deployed to a Kubernetes cluster can lead to versioning dependency hell, making it difficult for teams to manage their environments properly. Canary deployment is a method used to reduce the risk created when releasing new software versions by pushing out incremental releases to a subset of the infrastructure before rolling them out to the entire environment. This approach allows only a small group to be exposed to the new version while testing, reducing the impact of potential problems. Giving every team its own shared development environment can also help avoid conflicts, but it may push the problem down the line and lead to issues in staging. A service mesh can help by routing traffic between arbitrary versions of services, allowing for a stable and well-structured environment. However, at large scales, conflicts can arise, and a testing environment or feature development environment can be used to identify and fix compatibility issues before deploying to staging.