CI/CD

Deployment Strategies

In-Place Deployment

Pros:

Simplicity: Straightforward to implement and understand, requiring minimal infrastructure changes. Cost-effective: Does not require additional resources for parallel environments. Familiarity: Commonly used, making it well-understood by many teams. Cons:

Downtime: Likely to incur some downtime during deployment, affecting availability. Riskier: Limited scope for testing in production-like environments, increasing the risk of deployment issues. Rollback complexity: Rolling back a deployment can be complex and time-consuming.

Blue/Green Deployment

Pros:

Zero downtime: Allows for live environment swapping, ensuring no service disruption. Instant rollback: Easy and quick to revert to the previous version if issues arise. Testing in production: Facilitates final testing in a production-like environment before going live. Cons:

Cost: Requires double the environment resources, increasing infrastructure costs. Complexity: More complex setup and management compared to in-place deployments. Synchronization: Requires careful synchronization of databases and shared resources during the switch.

Canary Releases

Pros:

Risk mitigation: Gradual rollout reduces the impact of errors on the entire user base. Real user feedback: Enables gathering real-world usage feedback and performance metrics. Scalable: Adjust the user percentage based on feedback and performance data. Cons:

Management overhead: More complex to manage different versions among users. Metric analysis: Requires sophisticated monitoring and analysis tools to measure impact accurately. Rollout duration: Can take longer to fully deploy a feature or fix to all users.

A/B Testing Deployment

Pros:

Data-driven decisions: Direct comparison of different versions to make informed decisions based on user interaction. User-centric: Focuses on improving user experience and engagement. Incremental improvement: Allows for continuous improvement of features based on user feedback. Cons:

Complexity: Requires infrastructure to segment users and serve different versions. Analysis resources: Needs significant resources for data collection, monitoring, and analysis. Scope limitation: Typically limited to user-facing features, not suitable for backend changes.

Automated Testing Integration

Pros

Quality assurance: Ensures code changes meet quality standards before deployment. Early bug detection: Identifies and addresses issues early in the development cycle. Confidence: Increases confidence in the stability of the application with each release.

Cons

Setup time: Requires time and effort to set up comprehensive test suites initially. Maintenance: Test suites need regular updates to stay relevant to the application's evolution. False positives/negatives: Risk of tests not accurately reflecting real-world usage or issues.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for CI/CD Setup

Pros

  • Consistency: Ensures infrastructure provisioning consistency and reduces manual errors.
  • Speed: Accelerates the setup and scaling of environments.
  • Version control: Infrastructure changes can be versioned and tracked like application code.

Cons

Learning curve: Requires understanding IaC syntax and best practices. Initial setup: Takes time to define and test infrastructure code initially. Complexity: Managing and organizing IaC for large-scale environments can be complex.

Tools

GitHub

Repo Tips

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/github-special-files-and-paths

Games

https://github.com/joshzcold/Cold-Family-Feud

Actions

GitHub Action for pylint - GitHub Marketplace

Automating Dependabot with GitHub Actions - GitHub Docs