Travis-CI on Windows stuff

Travis-CI-Windows.md

Travis CI on Windows (Box Building)

Why not use Vagrant?

• Bare Box takes 20 minutes to Build
• While licensing itself is not an issue, activation is
  • Boxes would require maintiance every 30 days and rebuilding every 120 days
• No easy remote commands
  • ssh is through cygwin and cygwin doesn't present a clean environment
  • winrm is a HUGE PAIN if you're not on an Active Directory Domain
• Bare Box is HUGE (7 gigs with nothing installed)
• Box building isn't possible with VeeWee (no ssh)
  • Unattended Windows Installation is pretty good (this might be worth looking into)

Windows Azure Worker Role (PaaS)

Advangtages

• On demand VMs
• No building Boxes
• Windows "like" environment

Disadvantages

• Only Windows Server 2008
  • Not a big deal
• Windows "like" environment
• Built for static applications
• Hard to install applications
• Not a lot of documentation on tasks Travis-CI would need to perform

What do you mean Windows "like" environment"?

The environment itself looks, acts, and actually is a Windows environment, just not a Windows environment setup like I would expect on a normal Windows Box. (In other words, I don't know how to make things work)

Windows Azure VM Role

After the Meet Windows Azure event, it was announced that the VM Role would become much more of a IaaS product.

Advantages

• Microsoft provides bare Windows Server 2008 (and 2012) boxes
  • Plus some supported Linux distros
  • No HUGE box uploads (seriously this is awesome)
• Boxes are persisted! (IaaS)
  • Also, boxes state can be saved as an windows image (sysprep) for other boxes
• Custom Tailored Windows boxes

Disadvantages

• Still not easy to remote into
  • However, can join a Active Directory during VM provisioning
    • Setup and maintenance would require some knowledge into Microsoft technologies
• Currently a lot of the VM management is handled by Vagrant, that wouldn't be possible in this situation
  • knife-azure looks promising, but many of the Windows machine configuration options don't appear to be present

I'm focusing on my efforts VM Role

So, What Now?

Well, here's the deal. I haven't set the time aside to figure out how to put this altogether.

• A lot of the functionality in Travis-Worker isn't designed for this type of environment
• chef recipes need to be added for Windows
  • Likewise we need to figure out how to script box setup
• Need to figure out how to correctly setup the Active Directory Domain Services
  • This is crucial for remote commands *
  • The Active Directory Domain Controller would likely be the system that run Travis-Worker as well
• Use Virtual Networks to allow machines to communicate
  • Maybe not necessary
    • I understand networking well enough that it actually makes it easier
    • Other people may not

I'll try to keep this updated the more I find out.

[ * ] Ok, maybe not crucial for remote commands. However, crucial for my sanity and overall well being.

Also I suck at markdown

Could Windows containers/Hyper-V containers be a solution for this? That'd support Windows Server 2016 (which is essentially Windows 10, either core or nano)