Tips for continuous integration, deployment & delivery

#todayilearned #devops

TL;DR style notes from articles I read today.

When adding new automation, start small.
Make it easy to onboard. Configuring pipelines and listing alerts to monitor should be easier than manually deploying.
If a manual process was working fine apart from speed, let the automated process use the same model.
Isolate early pipeline stages by team environment to avoid affecting other teams right away.
Teach deployers to use context the way a human would - scan for open incidents, check whether changes have been merged (or it might use incomplete work).
Use internal feature flags to separate the deployment of changes and the enabling of features.

Full post here, 8 mins read

Small, frequent deploys contain less code and hence less risk of introducing bugs. Recovery is easier too.
Troubleshooting is easier because there is a single change (or just very few) to check and it is fresh in your mind.
Customers prefer quick access to new features. It ensures quick feedback from customers for every feature which can guide you to your next version.
You need a DevOps culture where the developer is also the deployer. Automate build and deployment to be quick and easy.
Set up the system for rolling upgrades, deploying server by server to avoid service interruption.
Make it easy to revert to an earlier version if there are problems with a new deploy.

Full post here, 5 mins read

Tips to help you scale up CI/CD flows for big projects if you are using Docker and Kubernetes:

Define your VCS (version control system) flow, with help from Git Flow or Github Flow.
When using a complicated manual release process, use tags to trigger production releases.
Adapt your Git flow for the number of environments you have.
Set up notification channels to track all CI flow processes.
Keep Docker images simple. Avoid passing env variables. Use the Run command or let Kubernetes handle this.
Define a Docker image naming convention - for development and UAT, where there is no rollback, you can use branch names as tags so the previous image is overridden; for production, tag with the release version number.
Execute database migrations as a separate step outside the Dockerfile.
Avoid private libraries and submodules.

Full post here, 5 mins read

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