Which aspect of DevOps is continuous release to production?
I am a DevOps engineer and I am assigned to a specific task in a company that Is related to streamlining the continuous releases process for deploying software of production in the company. Which aspect of DevOps helps in continuous release to production and how can I plan or make a strategy for implementation of continuous release to production considering automation, testing, monitoring, and rollback strategies?
In the context of DevOps, the aspect of DevOps which continuous release to production has included critical practices and aspects. Here is the outline of the key steps and strategies given below:-
Automated build and packaging
You can use infrastructure as code such as Terraform for defining and managing the environment.
You can execute automated deployment pipelines for pushing the changes from development testing to production.
Deploying automation
You can execute automated testing tools such as unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests at each stage.
You can also implement smoke tests or even health checks for validation of the basic function of the applications that are deployed.
Monitoring and observability
Set up monitoring tools such as Prometheus, grafana for tracking the application performance and errors.
You can implement logging and tracing tools for detailed visibility into the behavior of the application.
Release orchestration
Utilise the feature flags or even toggles to enable the features independently.
Rollback strategies
You should define the procedure and automate the rollback process in the conditions of deployment failure or even during occurrence of the errors or issues
Keep the previous version ready and do not forget to ensure backward compatibility.
Here is the example given of Jenkins Pipeline for building the deployment automation:
Pipeline {
Agent any
Stages {
Stage(‘Build’) {
Steps {
// Code to build the application
}
}
Stage(‘Test’) {
Steps {
// Code to run automated tests
}
}
Stage(‘Deploy to Production’) {
Steps {
// Code to deploy to production
}
}
}
}
Terraform configuration for the deployment of infrastructure
Resource “aws_ecs_service” “example_service” {
// Define ECS service configuration
// …
}
Resource “aws_ecs_task_definition” “example_task” {
// Define ECS task definition
// …
}You can execute the blue-green deployment and Canary to gradually rolling out of the chances and minimization of the risk factors.