The DevOps Handbook – Enabling Safe Deployments

We learn the secrets of a safe deployment practice while continuing to study The DevOps Handbook as Joe is a cartwheeling acrobat, Michael is not, and Allen is hurting, so much.

For those of you that are reading these show notes via their podcast player, you can find this episode’s full show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode140.

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• Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (utexas.edu)

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Enable Feedback to Safely Deploy Code

• Without a quick feedback loop:
  • Operations doesn’t like deploying developer code.
  • Developers complain about operations not wanting to deploy their code.
  • Given a button for anyone to push to deploy, nobody wants to push it.
• The solution is to deploy code with quick feedback loops.
  • If there’s a problem, fix it quickly and add new telemetry to track the fix.
  • Puts the information in front of everyone so there are no secrets.
• This encourages developers to write more tests and better code and they take more pride in releasing successful deployments.
  • An interesting side effect is developers are willing to check in smaller chunks of code because they know they’re safer to deploy and easier to reason about.
  • This also allows for frequent production releases with constant, tight feedback loops.
• Automating the deployment process isn’t enough. You must have monitoring of your telemetry integrated into that process for visibility.

Use Telemetry to Make Deployments Safer

• Always make sure you’re monitoring telemetry when doing a production release,
• If anything goes wrong, you should see it pretty immediately.
  • Nothing is “done” until it is operating as expected in the production environment.
• Just because you improve the development process, i.e. more unit tests, telemetry, etc., that doesn’t mean there won’t be issues. Having the