Continuous Deployment

Ron HeftCTO, The Social Station

About Me

• Certified Force.com Developer and Salesforce Administrator.

• 10+ years experience in full stack web development.

• Focus on Java, PHP, Apex, and Javascript.

• ronaldheft.com / @ronaldheft

About The Social Station

• Social media marketing startup based out of Allentown, PA.

• We’ve built a service to manage social media for small businesses.

• Platform consists of multiple integrations with social media partners, an internal management application, and client-facing web applications / mobile apps.

• Technology is key to our operation.

What is Continuous Deployment?

1. Version Control Best Practices

2. Continuous Integration

3. Feature Acceptance Criteria

4. Continuous Delivery

5. Zero Downtime Deployment

6. Continous Deployment

Using a Continuous Deployment Strategy

• More adaptive to business needs.

• Faster than agile..

• Embraces automation; less developer time spent on deployments.

• Best for hosted internal / external applications.

• Not compatible with self-install applications.

• Implementing some layers of CD is better than no layers.

Version Control Best Practices

• Use it.

• Git or Mercurial.

• Adapt a workflow like GitHub Flow.

Continuous Integration

• Test as much as possible.

• Database, security, unit, integrations, and more.

• Offload the unit testing to a CI server.

• Each branch should be independently tested.

• For GitHub / Heroku flow, I recommend Travis CI.

• Simple setup.

Feature Acceptance Criteria

• The process for taking a feature branch and merging it into a release-ready branch.

• Combination of CI tests, pull request, and discussion (code review).

• Watch for changes that have not been automated or require downtime!

Continuous Delivery

• At this point, a branch of code is ready for production.

• Delivery vs. Deployment

• The difference: Is the button push automated?

• This may be the stopping point for most workflows.

Zero Downtime Deployment

• For PaaS solutions like Salesforce and Heroku, the details are purely for background knowledge.

• This is up to Salesforce to implement and handle.

• Details on enabling zero downtime deployments in Heroku to follow.

Green - Blue Deployment

Load Balancer

User

Green Blue

Green - Blue Deployment

1. Load Balancer

• Green Environment (Existing)

• Blue Environment (New)

• Existing or On-demand

Load Balancer

User

Green Blue

Green - Blue Deployment

1. Load Balancer

• Green Environment (Existing)

• Blue Environment (New)

• Existing or On-demand

2. Deployment to Blue

• Automated Tests (Abort #1) Load Balancer

User

Green Blue

Green - Blue Deployment

1. Load Balancer

• Green Environment (Existing)

• Blue Environment (New)

• Existing or On-demand

2. Deployment to Blue

• Automated Tests (Abort #1)

3. Some Traffic to Blue

• Monitor Error Rate (Abort #2)

Load Balancer

User

Green Blue

Green - Blue Deployment

1. Load Balancer

• Green Environment (Existing)

• Blue Environment (New)

• Existing or On-demand

2. Deployment to Blue

• Automated Tests (Abort #1)

3. Some Traffic to Blue

• Monitor Error Rate (Abort #2)

4. All Traffic to Blue

• Spin Down Green (Abort #3)

• Blue is now green.

Load Balancer

User

Green Blue

Blue - Green Deployment Considerations

• Sessions (Not an issue with Heroku)

• Simultaneous Environments

• Database Changes

• No destructive changes without downtime.

• Message Queues

• Version messages.

• Front-end Applications

• No destructive changes / alert users to refresh app.

Zero Downtime Deployments in Heroku

• Pre-boot: Generally available since October 2014.

• heroku features:enable preboot

• Requires at least two web dynos.

• Does not apply to worker dynos.

• Deploys over ~5 minutes.

Continuous Deployment in Salesforce

• Implementing is difficult, if not impossible.

• Some enhancements coming to the process to make deployments faster.

• “Quick Deployment” is in pilot now (Winter ’15).

• Run production unit tests prior to deployment, then deploy up to 72 hours later.

Demo and Question Time