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+# Description of CI build configuration
+
+## Variables needed by travis
+
+- GITHUB_TOKEN - GitHub token with push access to repository
+- DOCKER_USERNAME - Username (netdatabot) with write access to docker hub repository
+- DOCKER_PWD - Password to docker hub
+- encrypted_8daf19481253_key - key needed by openssl to decrypt GCS credentials file
+- encrypted_8daf19481253_iv - IV needed by openssl to decrypt GCS credentials file
+- COVERITY_SCAN_TOKEN - Token to allow coverity test analysis uploads
+- SLACK_USERNAME - This is required for the slack notifications triggered by travis pipeline
+- SLACK_CHANNEL - This is the channel that Travis will be posting messages
+- SLACK_NOTIFY_WEBHOOK_URL - This is the incoming URL webhook as provided by slack integration. Visit Apps integration in slack to generate the required hook
+- SLACK_BOT_NAME - This is the name your bot will appear with on slack
+
+## CI workflow details
+Our CI pipeline is designed to help us identify and mitigate risks at all stages of implementation.
+To accommodate this need, we used [Travis CI](http://www.travis-ci.com) as our CI/CD tool.
+Our main areas of concern are:
+1) Only push code that is working. That means fail fast so that we can improve before we reach the public
+
+2) Reduce the time to market to minimum, by streamlining the release process.
+   That means a lot of testing, a lot of consistency checks, a lot of validations
+
+3) Generated artifacts consistency. We should not allow broken software to reach the public.
+   When this happens, it's embarassing and we struggle to eliminate it.
+
+4) We are an innovative company, so we love to automate :)
+
+
+Having said that, here's a brief introduction to Netdata's improved CI/CD pipeline with Travis.
+Our CI/CD lifecycle contains three different execution entry points:
+1) A user opens a pull request to netdata/master: Travis will run a pipeline on the branch under that PR
+2) A merge or commit happens on netdata/master. This will trigger travis to run, but we have two distinct cases in this scenario:
+   a) A user merges a pull request to netdata/master: Travis will run on master, after the merge.
+   b) A user runs a commit/merge with a special keyword (mentioned later).
+      This triggers a release for either minor, major or release candidate versions, depending the keyword
+3) A scheduled job runs on master once per day: Travis will run on master at the scheduled interval
+
+To accommodate all three entry points our CI/CD workflow has a set of steps that run on all three entry points.
+Once all these steps are successfull, then our pipeline executes another subset of steps for entry points 2 and 3.
+In travis terms the "steps" are "Stages" and within each stage we execute a set of activities called "jobs" in travis.
+
+### Always run: Stages that running on all three execution entry points
+
+## Code quality, linting, syntax, code style
+At this early stage we iterate through a set of basic quality control checks:
+- Shell checking: Run linters for our various BASH scripts
+- Checksum validators: Run validators to ensure our installers and documentation are in sync
+- Dashboard validator: We provide a pre-generated dashboard.js script file that we need to make sure its up to date. We validate that.
+
+## Build process
+At this stage, basically, we build :-)
+We do a baseline check of our build artifacts to guarantee they are not broken
+Briefly our activities include:
+- Verify docker builds successfully
+- Run the standard Netdata installer, to make sure we build & run properly
+- Do the same through 'make dist', as this is our stable channel for our kickstart files
+
+## Artifacts validation
+At this point we know our software is building, we need to go through the a set of checks, to guarantee
+that our product meets certain epxectations. At the current stage, we are focusing on basic capabilities
+like installing in different distributions, running the full lifecycle of install-run-update-install and so on.
+We are still working on enriching this with more and more use cases, to get us closer to achieving full stability of our software.
+Briefly we currently evaluate the following activities:
+- Basic software unit testing
+- Non containerized build and install on ubuntu 14.04
+- Non containerized build and install on ubuntu 18.04
+- Running the full Netdata lifecycle (install, update, uninstall) on ubuntu 18.04
+- Build and install on CentOS 6
+- Build and install on CentOS 7
+(More to come)
+
+### Nightly operations: Stages that run daily under cronjob
+The nightly stages are related to the daily nightly activities, that produce our daily latest releases.
+We also maintain a couple of cronjobs that run during the night to provide us with deeper insights,
+like for example coverity scanning or extended kickstart checksum checks
+
+## Nightly operations
+At this stage we run scheduled jobs and execute the nightly changelog generator, coverity scans,
+labeler for our issues and extended kickstart files checksum validations.
+
+## Nightly release
+During this stage we are building and publishing latest docker images, prepare the nightly artifacts
+and deploy them (the artifacts) to our google cloud service provider.
+
+
+### Publishing
+Publishing is responsible for executing the major/minor/patch releases and is separated
+in two stages: packaging preparation process and publishing.
+
+## Packaging for release
+During packaging we are preparing the release changelog information and run the labeler.
+
+## Publish for release
+The publishing stage is the most complex part in publishing. This is the stage were we generate and publish docker images,
+prepare the release artifacts and get ready with the release draft.
+
+### Package Management workflows
+As part of our goal to provide the best support to our customers, we have created a set of CI workflows to automatically produce
+DEB and RPM for multiple distributions. These workflows are implemented under the templated stages '_DEB_TEMPLATE' and '_RPM_TEMPLATE'.
+We currently plan to actively support the following Operating Systems, with a plan to further expand this list following our users needs.
+
+### Operating systems supported
+The following distributions are supported
+- Debian versions
+  - Buster (TBD - not released yet, check [debian releases](https://www.debian.org/releases/) for details)
+  - Stretch
+  - Jessie
+  - Wheezy
+
+- Ubuntu versions
+  - Disco
+  - Cosmic
+  - Bionic
+  - artful
+
+- Enterprise Linux versions (Covers Redhat, CentOS, and Amazon Linux with version 6)
+  - Version 8 (TBD)
+  - Version 7
+  - Version 6
+
+- Fedora versions
+  - Version 31 (TBD)
+  - Version 30
+  - Version 29
+  - Version 28
+
+- OpenSuSE versions
+  - 15.1
+  - 15.0
+
+- Gentoo distributions
+  - TBD
+
+### Architectures supported
+We plan to support amd64, x86 and arm64 architectures. As of June 2019 only amd64 and x86 will become available, as we are still working on solving issues with the architecture.
+
+The Package deployment can be triggered manually by executing an empty commit with the following message pattern: `[Package PACKAGE_TYPE PACKAGE_ARCH] DESCRIBE_THE_REASONING_HERE`.
+Travis Yaml configuration allows the user to combine package type and architecture as necessary to regenerate the current stable release (For example tag v1.15.0 as of 4th of May 2019)
+Sample patterns to trigger building of packages for all amd64 supported architecture:
+- '[Package amd64 RPM]': Build & publish all amd64 available RPM packages
+- '[Package amd64 DEB]': Build & publish all amd64 available DEB packages