Zuul is the continuous integration utility used by OpenStack to gate patchsets against tests. It takes care of communicating with gerrit (the code review system) and the test workers – usually Jenkins. You can read more about how the systems tie together on the OpenStack Project Infrastructure page.

The nice thing is that zuul doesn’t require you to use Jenkins. Anybody can provide a worker to zuul using the gearman protocol (which is a simple job server). Enter turbo-hipster*.

“Turbo-hipster is a CI worker with pluggable tasks initially designed to test OpenStack’s database migrations against copies of real databases.”

This will hopefully catch scenarios where changes to the database schema may not work due to outliers in real datasets and also help find where a migration may take an unreasonable amount of time against a large database.

In zuuls layout configuration we are able to specify which jobs should be ran against which projects in which pipelines. For example, for nova we want to run tests when a patchset is created, but we don’t need to run tests against it (necessarily) once it is merged etc. So in zuul we specify a new gate (aka job) to test nova against real databases.

turbo-hipster then listens for jobs created on that gate using the gearman protocol. Once it receives a patchset from zuul it creates a virtual environment and tests the upgrades. It then compiles and sends back the results.

At the moment turbo-hipster is still under heavy development but I hope to have it reporting results back to gerrit patchsets soon as part of zuuls report summary. For the moment I have a separate zuul instance running to test new nova patches and email the results back to me. Here is an example result report:

<code>Build succeeded.

- http://thw01.rcbops.com/logviewer/?q=/results/47/47162/9/check/gate-real-db-upgrade_nova_mysql/c4bc35c/index.html : SUCCESS in 13m 31s
</code>

*The name was randomly generated and does not necessarily contain meaning.