The Big Idea

Deployment is the art of updating a production environment with new code in a way that doesn’t interfere with a user’s experience of your product. It can be a harrowing, all hands on deck experience, or it can be like breathing, you do it without noticing.

A good software deployment process is critical to delivering a reliable and robust product. The foundational tenets that constitute an effective deployment process include:

1. Automation: Automated deployment reduces the risk of human error and increases efficiency. From building and testing to deployment, automation helps maintain consistency across different environments and speeds up the process.
2. Environment Consistency: All environments, from development to production, should be as identical as possible to ensure that software behaves consistently. Differences between environments often lead to unexpected issues in production.
3. Version Control: All components of the software, including application code, configuration, and database schema, should be under version control. This allows you to keep track of changes, identify what is running in production, and roll back to previous versions if needed.
4. Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Regular integration and testing of code changes can catch issues early, while continuous deployment ensures that your application is always in a deployable state.
5. Comprehensive Testing: Thorough testing, including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests, should be performed before deployment. This helps ensure the software is functioning as expected and reduces the chance of production bugs.
6. Feature Flags: The ability to toggle features on and off can reduce the risk associated with deployments. If issues arise with a new feature, you can quickly disable it without needing to redeploy.
7. Monitoring and Observability: Once deployed, software should be continuously monitored for performance, errors, and usage patterns. This helps you quickly detect and resolve any issues and understand how your application is used in the wild.
8. Rollback Strategy: No matter how well you test, issues can still arise in production. A good deployment process includes a strategy for quickly and safely rolling back deployments that cause problems.
9. Communication: Transparent communication about deployments, including when they will happen and what they include, helps ensure everyone on the team is informed. This is particularly important for larger teams or when deployments may impact users.

Each of these tenets, when applied effectively, can significantly improve the deployment process, reducing risks and increasing the reliability and robustness of your software.

When considering your Deployability process, its important to remember that effective deployment processes don’t just serve Engineering. There are many stakeholders who rely on Engineering being efficient and effective at deployment.

• Product wants to ensure everything was delivered properly, and in the right sequence, so that the feature works properly
• Sales wants to ensure the delivery doesn’t disrupt an important demo
• Customer Service wants to ensure they aren’t going to get support calls from customers because the product isn’t working properly
• The CEO wants to ensure developers are highly productive at all times, and not spending time not developing code and instead doing rote manual tasks that could be automated.

There are many opportunities to further automation in your environment as there are many steps to this deployment process.