Introduction
Get introduced to progressive delivery and canary deployments.
We'll cover the following...
Iterative approach to deployments
Progressive delivery is a deployment practice that aims to roll out new features gradually. It enforces the gradual release of a feature while, at the same time, trying to avoid downtime. It’s an iterative approach to deployments.
There we go. That’s the definition. It’s intentionally broad because progressive delivery encompasses quite a few practices, like blue/green deployments, rolling updates, canary deployments, and so on.
Soon we’ll see what it looks like in practice. For now, the most crucial question is not what it is, but why do we want it and which problems does it solve?
Traditional deployment mechanism
The “traditional” deployment mechanism consists of shutting down the old release and deploying a new one in its place. Sometimes it’s called “big bang” deployment, even though the more commonly used term is “recreate strategy.”
The major problem with big bang deployments is downtime. In between shutting down the old release and deploying a new one in its place, there’s a period during which the application isn’t available. That’s the time when neither the old nor the new releases are running. Users don’t like that, and businesses hate the idea of not being able to serve users. Downtime might be one of the main reasons why we had infrequent releases in the past.
If there’s inevitable downtime associated with the deployment of new releases, it makes sense not to do it often. The fewer releases we do during a year, the less downtime caused by new deployments we have. But that’s ...
