DevOpsDaysTO May 2015: RelayRobin Continuous Delivery

I gave a quick ignite talk about the continuous delivery pipeline on the RelayRobin product team at Myplanet.

Transcript

1. How We Continuously Deploy …every three months
2. RelayRobin • web-based management interface (PHP+JS) • manages video-conference resources ◦ dial-in numbers ◦ billing
3. Our Customers • telecoms, big service providers • on-premise or private cloud installation
4. Customer Ops • pushing once every 3-6 months • rarely familiar with DevOps
5. Deployment Realities • red-tape, little experience with OS (Debian) • install needs to be very hands-off ◦ appliance mentality
6. Meanwhile at Myplanet • huge focus on UI and user delight • constantly improving experience
7. Move Fast (Avoid Breaking Things) • nimble codebase is top priority • startup-style feature pivoting • impatience with release inertia
8. Continuous Delivery • committed to CD early • frequent internal releases, batched into big external upgrades
9. Raise Internal Expectations • weekly+ external sales demos on latest code • fix defects first, add features after
10. Preserving Quality • everyone knows the stakes ◦ but of course do automated tests for all most things • small team, code reviews
11. Branching and Releases • just master ◦ short-lived pull-requests right on top of it • always good to go
12. Branching and Releases • releases are like full forks • maintained and patched separately
13. Debian Packages • code and installer scripts are inside .deb files • automatically built in CI pipeline
14. Data Schema Migrations • automatic DB updates • sequence of small incremental change scripts
15. Data Schema Migrations • devs are liberated to change tables/columns at will • always automatic, no “custom followup step” on install
16. Upgrade Sequence • almost one line: unpack and run “upgrade” • new .deb files get installed ◦ performs DB migration
17. Discipline is Everything • continuous delivery as internal discipline ◦ external demos on latest ◦ design + PO + dev run same code
18. Discipline is Everything • impatience ◦ zero dev tolerance for release inertia BS ◦ huge pushback against manual install steps (both on dev environment and in production)
19. Results • 1.5 year-old codebase • 57 release tags in the last year ◦ 3-5 versions in the wild at any moment
20. Results • 20 minute customer install ◦ best observed case (not everyone, obvs) ◦ “is that it? cool!” • easy-peasy, going home happy Nick Matantsev