A Release Gate Must Fail Before Incompatible Code Goes Live

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We had a deployment step everybody knew about and people still forgot it. The code was pulled manually, then someone had to run a shell script which applied pending migrations. The instructions existed, but the habit remained concentrated in one operator.

Eventually a deployment completed without the script. Traffic reached code which expected columns or tables that did not exist, and database queries began failing. Running the migrations restored the application. There was no obscure database bug here; the release process had declared success before one of its prerequisites was true.

Deployments on Brian Faust

A Release Gate Must Fail Before Incompatible Code Goes Live