Continuous Delivery

Back when I first started building web apps we’d just “do it in production” by vi’ing Perl & PHP files on the server. This was fine because the risks and expectations were low. No big deal if I broke the app for a few hours. Good thing I made an app.php-bak copy!

As software became more critical to businesses, the risks of making changes to production systems increased. To cope with these risks we slowed down delivery through processes. Today many enterprises are so bogged down by risk aversion that they may only deploy to production once a year or less. The rate of change in businesses and software continues to increase and the expectations are even higher. Downtime is not an option but that change also needs to go out now!

Over the past 10 years the ways we build and deliver applications has changed significantly. It seems like much of this change has happened overnight but don’t worry, it is perfectly normal to look up and feel disoriented in the 2015 deployment landscape.

This article compares the deployment in 2005 with “modern” deployment so that all the new terms and techniques will make sense. Forewarning: My background is primarily Java / JVM so I will use that terminology but try to make the ideas polyglot.

My favorite new feature on Heroku is the GitHub Integration which enables auto-deployment of GitHub repos. Whenever a change is made on GitHub the app can be automatically redeployed on Heroku. You can even tell Heroku to wait until the CI tests pass before doing the deployment. I now use this on almost all of my Heroku apps because it allows me to move faster and do less thinking (which I’m fond of).

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting Practicing Continuous Delivery on the Cloud at the Atlanta No Fluff Just Stuff conference. Here is the session description:

This session will teach you best practices and patterns for doing Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment in Cloud environments. You will learn how to handle schema migrations, maintain dev/prod parity, manage configuration and scaling. This session will use Heroku as an example platform but the patterns could be implemented anywhere.

Tomorrow night (July 10, 2012) I’ll be presenting about Continuous Delivery on the Cloud at the Nashville Java Users’ Group. This presentation focuses on how to implement continuous delivery in cloud environments. I will use Play 2 and Heroku to illustrate concepts like managing configuration, schema changes, and externalized state. I hope to see you there!