Intermittent deployment halted, distribution of artifacts fails

Products

• CA Release Automation - Release Operations Center (Nolio)
• CA Release Automation - DataManagement Server (Nolio)

Issue/Introduction

In this scenario, we have an integration of Release Automation(RA) with Team-city build definition under post build task where on completion of Team-city build a Release will be triggered in RA. In the build definition of Team-city the artifacts are getting store in Team-city artifactory and same will be used in RA releases as an artifacts.

Problem faced in above scenario is that, the releases executed are pause-failed/halt intermittently in the stage of "Artifact distribution" and on resuming same halted releases progresses fine and artifact distribution complete successfully.

Environment

Team-City: 10.1/2017Release Automation: 6.2 or higherRelease Automation Agents: 5.5.2 or higher

Cause

During review of logs of agents, we identified that the issue is lying within Team-city artifactory where the uploaded artifacts during Team-city build is not getting index ready by time RA agents (agents responsible for distribution of artifacts) are making a download request to Team-city artifactory.

We identified the same from the logs (nolio_all.log) which during failed-paused state throws HTTP 404 error which on resume goes fine.

2017-09-19 04:45:53,843 [ArtifactsHandlers-4] INFO  (com.nolio.platform.shared.communication.services.artifacts.repositoryplugins.ArtifactRepositoryPlugin:231) - Artifact [/20/Test_Service_EAR/test-33/EAR-test-33.zip] was not found in the repository [https://NAC-URL:NAC-Port/nexus/content/repositories/nolio]. response was [HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found]

2017-09-19 04:45:53,845 [ArtifactsHandlers-4] DEBUG (com.nolio.platform.shared.communication.services.artifacts.ArtifactCommunicationService:318) - Artifact [/20/Test_Service_EAR/test-33/EAR-test-33.zip] was not found in the repository, It will be uploaded to the repository after it's retrieved.

Resolution

To overcome this issue, where newly created/uploaded artifacts are not yet indexed ready in Team-city repository a delay in execution of Release can be introduced either at Team-city end or at Release Automation process(mapped in release) end making sure the indexed are ready before a GET request for same is made by RA agents.