Comments on: Continuous Deployment: radical idea or April fool? http://jamesmckay.net/2009/04/continuous-deployment-radical-idea-or-april-fool/ because there are few things that are less logical than business logic Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:14:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Hardip Singh http://jamesmckay.net/2009/04/continuous-deployment-radical-idea-or-april-fool/comment-page-1/#comment-3886 Hardip Singh Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:13:12 +0000 http://jamesmckay.net/2009/04/continuous-deployment-radical-idea-or-april-fool/#comment-3886 Sorry, I meant to add that I agree that unmanned deployments to a live environment is pretty risky. I definitely would not do that for our app. The ability to do a push button deployment and run some smoke tests against the live site is a good idea IMO though. Sorry, I meant to add that I agree that unmanned deployments to a live environment is pretty risky. I definitely would not do that for our app. The ability to do a push button deployment and run some smoke tests against the live site is a good idea IMO though.

]]> By: Hardip Singh http://jamesmckay.net/2009/04/continuous-deployment-radical-idea-or-april-fool/comment-page-1/#comment-3885 Hardip Singh Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:09:23 +0000 http://jamesmckay.net/2009/04/continuous-deployment-radical-idea-or-april-fool/#comment-3885 I am working on a project now where we recently setup with CI. For con't buillds, we look for modifications every 1/2 hour and if modifications are detected, we build the code and run unit tests. We also recently added in continuous deployments. The continuous deployments do not occur as frequently though. We have the deployments scheduled for every midnight (off work hour for most). There were 2 drivers that made us setup our CI environment to do deployments. 1) We have an entire suite of functional (selenium) tests that we run against our entire web app after a deployment is complete. The automated deployments not only gives us insight into whether or not anyone broke the build/deployment, but also gives us the ability to automate functional tests against our app. 2) Having deployments inside of our CI environment allow for a one button deployment system which is a lot better than our previous mechanism. If we had dedicated app servers that we can deploy code to more frequently w/out disrupting any testing that would be going on, I would do the deployments more frequently. For now though we are deploying to environments that are also used by QA / Product folks to do their testing. I do agree that in some situations Con't deployments don't make sense, but in our case, I feel that they did. I am working on a project now where we recently setup with CI. For con’t buillds, we look for modifications every 1/2 hour and if modifications are detected, we build the code and run unit tests. We also recently added in continuous deployments. The continuous deployments do not occur as frequently though. We have the deployments scheduled for every midnight (off work hour for most). There were 2 drivers that made us setup our CI environment to do deployments.

1) We have an entire suite of functional (selenium) tests that we run against our entire web app after a deployment is complete. The automated deployments not only gives us insight into whether or not anyone broke the build/deployment, but also gives us the ability to automate functional tests against our app.

2) Having deployments inside of our CI environment allow for a one button deployment system which is a lot better than our previous mechanism.

If we had dedicated app servers that we can deploy code to more frequently w/out disrupting any testing that would be going on, I would do the deployments more frequently. For now though we are deploying to environments that are also used by QA / Product folks to do their testing.

I do agree that in some situations Con’t deployments don’t make sense, but in our case, I feel that they did.

]]>