8 Off-hour deployments
This chapter covers
- Longer release cycles and their impact to the team’s deployment confidence
- Automation techniques for deployments
- The value of code deployment artifacts
- Feature flags for releasing incomplete code
Deployments are sometimes these big scary events. Sometimes the ritual around these deployments can be justified. But it’s much more common that the eventfulness of your deployments is a symptom of something deeper going on with your deployment strategies. Off-hour deployments are an anti-pattern that feels justified in protecting your organization. But in reality, you’re treating the symptom instead of the problem. If you get calendar invites for routine deployments, then there might be a better way.
8.1 War story
Patrick runs the product organization at the FunCo company. One day his phone rings and it’s Jaheim from the sales department. Jaheim has been working his way into a sales meeting with a Quantisys, a large player in the market. He finally got a chance to demo the software in front of the Quantisys senior leadership team and they absolutely fell in love with it. But like all dream deals, there was a catch. The software needed to integrate with Quantisys’ current billing system. Jaheim knows that billing integrations are high on the list of features the development team is working on. He hoped that if he could get the integration Quantisys needed prioritized and implemented quickly, it might be enough to salvage the deal.