Why Your Releases Needs to be Rolling & Boring?
TL;DR: Add features incrementally to production. Make Releases a routine task so that it becomes boring.
Are you excited about your next release?
Do you have No deploy Fridays? Are you waiting for the client’s business closing hours for production deployment?
If something is keeping you on your toes for the next production release, you need to improve.
Keep the Code Rolling
The aim is to get the code to be on production deployment as soon as possible. Time to production should be minimised at all cost.
The agile method advocates keeping the tasks atomic. For this to work, the Definition of Done should be clearly stated for each task.
If something is marked as done after the different phases of Automated testing, QA verification and Product Owner’s approval, why should it be further delayed to production.
Something that shouldn’t be accessible to the end user, can be hidden using Feature Flags. With the page/component behind the feature flag, you get to test your task while on production. This task can be further re-iterated by issuing subsequent tasks.
Minimise the Risk and Blast Radius
Things may and will go wrong sometimes. This is applicable even if your release is occurring every Month/Quater/Year. But with incremental changes being delivered, the Definition of Done should include the steps required in case things go sideways.
This may include
- Automated Database Snapshots before deployment
- Rollback scripts in case of a destructive upgrade
- A/B testing
- Different update strategy
Boring Deployments
Keep the deployments as boring as you can. The chimes in Teams/Slack during the production release/deployment needs to be minimal.
Having a nightly job for production release may be a bit ambitious(Or is it :P). But with a click of a button, the continuous deployment tool should deploy the new release to the production environment.
To ensure a sound release, you can check the current status and analytics using tools like Grafana. Also having a fine-tuned alert system, like Prometheus is encouraged.
Keep Calm and Enjoy Life
