#nostaging

Do you really need that staging environment? (Lightning talk from London Continuous Delivery Meetup)

Transcript

1. #nostaging @davenolan
2. Rejected snowclones Staging considered harmful Where we’re going, we don’t need staging Staging is hard let’s go shopping “I know! I’ll use staging.” Now you have 2 problems All the world's a stage and the email addresses merely test@example.com
3. #nostaging @davenolan
4. “Staging” Weasel word
5. Identical to production “Yes but in staging...”
6. Production minus users Fake data, real problems
7. A mirror of production Swaps left & right Doesn’t swap up & down Except...
8. A sham A simulation environment
9. Staging A permanent general-purpose simulacrum All releases flow through it before production
10. “Don’t test in prod” You can, and in some cases you should.
11. UAT / QA / Sign-off Is the logo big enough?
12. UAT / QA / Sign-off feature flags #nostaging
13. Data integrity “I don’t want your dirty test data in my pure-as-the- driven-snow production datastore”
14. Data integrity filter, partition, reset #nostaging
15. “I need to see it” “I need to see it with my own eyes”
16. “I need to see it” dark-age superstition < instrumentation aka science #nostaging
17. Integration Wire together all the things
18. Integration circuit breakers, backoff, versioning #nostaging
19. Integration kill switches, dark launches, rolling releases, branch-by-abstraction, consumer- drive contracts #nostaging
20. Theorem #1 If you can release it without downtime, you don’t need to stage it #nostaging
21. Being dumb in staging beats being clever in production
22. Theorem #2 Routine activity can be pushed into prod or dev; Complex changes need custom environments
23. #nostaging A permanent multi-purpose staging env in your release pipeline means: ➔ longer feedback ➔ surprisingly high cost and complexity ➔ new and exciting failure modes ➔ lower-than-expected confidence There are often better options.
24. #nostaging @davenolan