Stop thinking, go faster

Findings and lessons learned while moving towards continuous deployment @ Elmar

Transcript

1. Improving Deployment @ Elmar Stop thinking, go faster!
3. Case study Elmar.nl
4. Our deployment procedure is complex and full of manual steps
6. Wait, didn't we have automatic failover?
7. Don't run puppet??? Wait, didn't we have automatic failover?
8. It's like controlling an airplane
9. If we press the wrong button...
11. What if we don't need to think about failover?
12. What if we don't need to think about old cache?
13. What if we don't need to think before running puppet?
14. What if we don't need to think?
15. What if we don't need to think!
16. What are we afraid of?
17. Go faster!
18. Going faster increases the frequency, but massively decreases the magnitude of risk
19. Being able to go fast implies being able to recover fast from failures
20. Automate everything!
21. Not having to think decreases the frequency of making mistakes
23. Allow for simple rollback • Blue-Green deployment • Canary releasing
24. The sheer thought of having a rollback procedure will give you peace of mind
25. Elmar's deployment procedure v2 1. Run puppet on load balancers to install the new static resources 2. Run puppet on app server 1 to install the new web app 3. Check if it worked (optionally) 4. Run puppet on app server 2 to install the new web app
26. Solution 1. Allow us to have a controlled amount of versions of static resources deployed in production 2. Each app points to a specific version of the static resources 3. While we're installing a new version, the old one still works
27. We're targeting Debian environments, so we benefit from the Debian package system
28. To implement our solution, we've used metapackages just like the ones for the kernel
29. A metapackage does not contain software, they just depend on other packages to be installed
30. Limit the amount of versions installed
31. Using metapackages...
32. ...which replace each other
33. Package clean up occurs when a conflicting version is installed
34. Zero downtime
35. Linux virtual server
41. Demo