Add job hardware capabilities

Job hardware servers are organized by capabilities in Continuous Delivery. A capability is a tag that indicates what type of jobs can run on that job hardware server. If you're managing a lot of job hardware servers, use capabilities to distribute the testing load.

Capabilities organize your job hardware servers and ensure that jobs run on hardware with the right characteristics. Continuous Delivery automatically creates a Containerized capability for you, and you can create additional capabilities according to your needs.

For example, assume you want to create a new job that requires Python 3. To ensure Continuous Delivery can run this job, you need to create a python-3 capability in Continuous Delivery and assign to that capability all job hardware servers that have Python 3 installed and configured. Then, when you create the job that uses Python 3, specify that the job requires job hardware with the python-3 capability. When you run this job, Continuous Delivery automatically locates a job hardware server with the python-3 capability and uses that job hardware server to run the job.

In addition to software requirements, useful capabilities include:

  • Operating systems
  • Organizational designations, such as dev-team-philly-testing
  • Puppet testing resources, such as onceover or Puppet Development Kit

Only the administrator of a workspace, the root user, and super users can add hardware capabilities to a workspace.
  1. In the Continuous Delivery web UI, click Hardware.
  2. Click Add capability and name your new capability.
  3. To assign job hardware servers to the capability, select the PE instance that manages the node you've selected as job hardware, and then select the nodes you want to assign to the capability.

    Selected nodes appear in the Hardware with this capability list.

  4. After selecting all the nodes you want to assign to this capability, click Save.
Results
Your job hardware is now assigned to a capability. To add capabilities to jobs in your workspace, click Jobs > Edit job, and select options from the list of capabilities.