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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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How does deployment work at your organization?

What is the process to get code into prod?

Oldest comments (72)

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jep profile image
Jim • Edited

The coolest and most frustrating thing about DevOps is there's a hundred different ways to do something. I say this in hope I won't be judged too harshly for how we do deployments.

I should first mention that we're not a company in the web app space. The company I love working for primarily creates cross-platform C++ applications that run on Linux/Windows appliances. Also, as a DevOps Engineer, my customers aren't always actual customers. More often than not, they're developers. When we deploy, we remotely update the Linux or Windows platform, then uninstall anything existing software, reboot, then install the most up to date software, license it, and verify the installation was successful.

We accomplish this primarily through Ansible playbooks that deal with the actual deployment, and use Jenkins jobs as the self-service mechanism for our developer customers. When devs want to upgrade their systems to test or do whatever, they can go to Jenkins, enter their IP and select the version to install and click 'Build'. The rest of the process is seamless to the customer, with the exception of the 'DevOps is deploying' screen we run during the deployment to let the remote user know the system is doing something.

I know we could look into Ansible Tower or FOSS alternatives, but people got used to Jenkins so I try to let that be the common interface for self-service tasks performed by our developer customers that need an automated capability.

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shenril profile image
Shenril • Edited

AWX should meet your needs , it s basically Tower for free and integrates with your existing ansible roles
github.com/ansible/awx

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nataliedeweerd profile image
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Edited

Honestly - it's just FTP & manual database pushes 🤷‍♀️
It's not sophisticated or fancy, but it works.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

No shame in not using “fancy” CI tools. Whatever does the job.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

Obviously you don't have to be ashamed for not using "fancy" CI tools, but when you do, you'll see why people are using it.

I learned on last 10 years that technologies that meet a need stay, and technologies that don't, disappear or remain in legacy projects.

Git isn't something new (as you should know). CI scripts aren't new too, it only simplified the two-step task - where you were using git, svn, mercurial or wharever with a Rundeck or similar automation that needed to be fired manually - into a single step one where devs only need to push to master (if permissions) and it all rolls smooth into production and able to roll-back easily if needed.

If you are not using a version control service, then yes, you need to be ashamed.

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felipperegazio profile image
Felippe Regazio

I agree with Ben, "Whatever does the job". I worked on a company that had this approach too with huge legacy products. I wrote an script to automate deployments like that with ssh, maybe could be useful for you: github.com/felippe-regazio/sh-simp...

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nicolus profile image
Nicolus • Edited

Thank you for your answer, it's important to keep in mind that even though we read all day long about fancy new techniques and tools, most of us are working on legacy codebases and deploying manually.

That said, Continuous Deployment is not just a fad. I recently changed jobs and moved from gitlab CI/CD (which is really nice) to a mix of "git pull" on the server, SFTP, rsync, and running the migrations manually... And it's a huge pain and a huge waste of time (not to mention that if something goes wrong we don't have an easy way to rollback to the previous version).

I haven't yet setup CI/CD pipelines because we use on premise Bitbucket and it doesn't seem to offer CI/CD (so it means we'll need to install Jenkins or something and I'll have to learn that), but it's pretty high on my todo list.

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kbariotis profile image
Kostas Bariotis

It does, it’s called pipelines I think. It’s pretty descent.

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nicolus profile image
Nicolus

As far as I can tell pipelined is only available on bitbucket cloud, and not the self hosted version (bitbucket server) ? I'd love to be wrong though.

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kbariotis profile image
Kostas Bariotis

Ah ok, I don't know more about that.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

I used to be on BitBucket too, but i definitely changed to GitLab and I find no reason to use something different, i recommend you to take a try. I don't use self-hosted but i guess you will have same options.

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eleftrik profile image
Erik D'Ercole

We zero-downtime deploy our applications (mostly PHP - Laravel or WordPress - but not only) with deployer.org/.
Very easy, fast and reliable.

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fvaldes33 profile image
Franco Valdes

This is awesome! had never heard of it. Will give it a shot with Craft CMS (yii2) base platform.

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barelyhuman profile image
Reaper

Gitlab CI/CD at my “Financial” Support Org.

Github Actions at BarelyHuman

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

AWS CodePipeline + AWS CodeDeploy + AWS CodeBuild

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fvaldes33 profile image
Franco Valdes

What stack? I have run into issues using NextJS with this deployment approach. TIA

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Ruby on Rails, though the process is identical because NextJS is just a nodejs app.
I had a course I made on Udemy last year for creating a pipeline with Rails but you could just ski the Rails part. I've been meaning to release that video course for free.

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peiche profile image
Paul

I would love to get to this point with my job.

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rinzler profile image
Rinzler

Same here, only our stack is HTML/JS/CSS + Python/Django + MongoDB/MariaDB. Every code merged into develop branch on Github Repo is immediately deployed to our dev/staging environment also on AWS, same process on master -> production counterparts.

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Ryan

Jenkins with GitFlow for larger, high-risk products that require more gates to be crossed, and plain ol' jenkins plus github hooks to automatically build and deploy for smaller products and products with less risk.

Whatever works for you, the tool chain should match the need!

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Leonardo Teteo

We use GoCD to handle the deployment, from Bitbucket, our repository, to our Docker clusters on AWS.

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Vicente G. Reyes

Just the netlify cli for static sites and heroku cli for dynamic sites.

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Rich Field

At the day job we have several projects that are deployed independently using BuildKite.

For a freelance client I use CodeShip to handle the deployment of a Firebase hosted site, Firebase Functions and Firebase Database migrations - triggered by a push to the repo. Each branch in the repo deploys separate site/functions/db.

For most small personal projects I use react-static and Netlify; so it's simply a push to the repo.

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Elizabeth Alcalá

AWS Amplify for the frontend app and our serverless backend.