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Arpit Mohan
Arpit Mohan

Posted on • Originally published at insnippets.com

Tips for continuous integration, deployment & delivery

TL;DR style notes from articles I read today.

Automated continuous deployment at Heroku

  • When adding new automation, start small.
  • Make it easy to onboard. Configuring pipelines and listing alerts to monitor should be easier than manually deploying.
  • If a manual process was working fine apart from speed, let the automated process use the same model.
  • Isolate early pipeline stages by team environment to avoid affecting other teams right away.
  • Teach deployers to use context the way a human would - scan for open incidents, check whether changes have been merged (or it might use incomplete work).
  • Use internal feature flags to separate the deployment of changes and the enabling of features.

Full post here, 8 mins read


Benefits of continuous delivery

  • Small, frequent deploys contain less code and hence less risk of introducing bugs. Recovery is easier too.
  • Troubleshooting is easier because there is a single change (or just very few) to check and it is fresh in your mind.
  • Customers prefer quick access to new features. It ensures quick feedback from customers for every feature which can guide you to your next version.
  • You need a DevOps culture where the developer is also the deployer. Automate build and deployment to be quick and easy.
  • Set up the system for rolling upgrades, deploying server by server to avoid service interruption.
  • Make it easy to revert to an earlier version if there are problems with a new deploy.

Full post here, 5 mins read


Tips and tricks for scalable CI/CD flow

Tips to help you scale up CI/CD flows for big projects if you are using Docker and Kubernetes:

  • Define your VCS (version control system) flow, with help from Git Flow or Github Flow.
  • When using a complicated manual release process, use tags to trigger production releases.
  • Adapt your Git flow for the number of environments you have.
  • Set up notification channels to track all CI flow processes.
  • Keep Docker images simple. Avoid passing env variables. Use the Run command or let Kubernetes handle this.
  • Define a Docker image naming convention - for development and UAT, where there is no rollback, you can use branch names as tags so the previous image is overridden; for production, tag with the release version number.
  • Execute database migrations as a separate step outside the Dockerfile.
  • Avoid private libraries and submodules.

Full post here, 5 mins read


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