7 ms·

Why Continuous Integration and Delivery Is Important

41 points by thailor3 7y ago

hyko 7y ago
Is it possible to tag Medium posts so we can filter them out?
- thailor3 7y ago
  Yeah, i can do that next time, sorry about that... I can also share the "friend link" so that everyone can view without needing a membership.. thanks for the feedback
  - tr1coder 7y ago
    You can view it for free in incognito.
  - hyko 7y ago
    No problem, it was more of a general comment really. Thank you!
- steveeq1 7y ago
  What is the issue with medium?
  - s_dev 7y ago
    It's a paywall for most of us now but it wasn't originally. I deleted my Medium account the other day. Like a lot of projects and companies it's just not what it started out as.
    - Kuinox 7y ago
      Use the private mode of your browser and the paywall will be gone.
      - s_dev 7y ago
        I don't want to alter my behavior or browser configuration. I want the policy at the HN submissions level.
        overcast 7y ago
        So you want to alter everyone else's behavior except for your own?
- rezgi 7y ago
  Firefox's reader view seems to work. The image are blurry but does it really matter.
treyhuffine 7y ago
Friend Link (no paywall): https://levelup.gitconnected.com/heres-why-continuous-integration-and-deployment-is-so-important-to-the-software-development-c0caeead5881?source=friends_link&sk=82592dcef8b9de843ed7192555c4f000 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/heres-why-continuous-integr...
notyourday 7y ago
The blast radius of CD covers company's bank accounts. The only way to safely do CD in a customer facing non-toy project ( aka there's a revenue attached to the project ) is to have stack built from the ground up to support request pinning, request tracing, request shifting in addition to the regular instrumentation monitoring and 100% integration test coverage. One can probably do it if that one is Google or Facebook. You aren't Google or Facebook. Don't be a hero. Don't do CD.
- cheesysam 7y ago
  What is 'request pinning, request tracing, request shifting'?
  - thailor3 7y ago
    I'm asking myself the same thing... but I think he is referring to Load Balancing and Logging and maybe Public Key Pinning? Not sure... I'm however sure that Google and Facebook are not the only ones who do Load Balancing and Logging and therefore aren't the only ones who can benefit from CD :)
  - notyourday 7y ago
    Being able to pin a set of requests to a specific path inside the infrastructure to they touch only specific instances running specific versions without adding "if blah-blah-blah" custom code into every deploy Being able to trace every request across the entire infrastructure including all sub-requests the original request triggered. Being able to observe issues pinned requests caused, automatically trigger an action when an error rate exceeds the threshold, typically removing the pinning.
- jpdb 7y ago
  There seems to be a misunderstanding regarding what Continuous Delivery (CD) is, as well as what is all required. CD doesn't necessarily refer to Deployment of Delivered artifacts. Instead, once code is merged back into your release branch (sometimes master branch, sometimes tag, sometimes an actual release branch), it should be made available to be launched to production. This doesn't mean more testing isn't required and it doesn't mean that humans are not involved. Continuous Deployment is the process of releasing software to production automatically. If you did in fact mean Continuous Deployment then you do not need 100% integration test coverage or anything of that nature. Typically, the process might work by releasing a canary deploy which receives a fraction of the traffic going to production. In the unlikely event a breaking change has silently made it through your other tests, it should likely be caught when it is deployed as a canary. If in the extremely unlikely scenario it makes it through both then the existing pipeline you have can be used to "roll-forward" a fix automatically instead of via the human process that is much more likely to fail. This may seem like a lot to you, but you are front-loading quite a bit of work and a mature pipeline is much less error prone than manual deploys.
gfs78 7y ago
On continuous delivery: "Given that all of the changes deployed are individual commits, the deployments are low risk and cause less bugs". I would like to know the source of this claim. I guess someone did an study on this...
- inkeddeveloper 7y ago
  I would likewise like to know the basis behind these claims. There have been countless instances when I've been reviewing a PR and found changes completely unrelated to the task at hand (user story or bug). One commit often has a scattering of changes that get lumped into one git add * git commit. In a disciplined world full of mindful developers, I could see this being a thing. But I have little faith this could be sustained in a majority of dev shops. I'm not trying to be negative Nancy but realistic Ron.
- ses1984 7y ago
  There's an implied "other things being equal" in there. Given the commits follow some normal distribution of quality and risk, it's less risky on average to apply one of those average commits than it is to apply a bunch of them. But if you try to deliver one giant risky commit, you're doing CD in name only.
digitalsushi 7y ago
Why is washing dishes as you cook so much easier than washing them a week later when the crust is difficult to remember what your code meant when you wrote it?

41 points by thailor3 7y ago

hyko 7y ago

Is it possible to tag Medium posts so we can filter them out?

thailor3 7y ago
Yeah, i can do that next time, sorry about that... I can also share the "friend link" so that everyone can view without needing a membership.. thanks for the feedback
- tr1coder 7y ago
  You can view it for free in incognito.
- hyko 7y ago
  No problem, it was more of a general comment really. Thank you!
steveeq1 7y ago
What is the issue with medium?
- s_dev 7y ago
  It's a paywall for most of us now but it wasn't originally. I deleted my Medium account the other day. Like a lot of projects and companies it's just not what it started out as.
  - Kuinox 7y ago
    Use the private mode of your browser and the paywall will be gone.
    - s_dev 7y ago
      I don't want to alter my behavior or browser configuration. I want the policy at the HN submissions level.
      - overcast 7y ago
        So you want to alter everyone else's behavior except for your own?
rezgi 7y ago
Firefox's reader view seems to work. The image are blurry but does it really matter.

treyhuffine 7y ago

Friend Link (no paywall): https://levelup.gitconnected.com/heres-why-continuous-integration-and-deployment-is-so-important-to-the-software-development-c0caeead5881?source=friends_link&sk=82592dcef8b9de843ed7192555c4f000 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/heres-why-continuous-integr...

notyourday 7y ago

The blast radius of CD covers company's bank accounts. The only way to safely do CD in a customer facing non-toy project ( aka there's a revenue attached to the project ) is to have stack built from the ground up to support request pinning, request tracing, request shifting in addition to the regular instrumentation monitoring and 100% integration test coverage. One can probably do it if that one is Google or Facebook. You aren't Google or Facebook. Don't be a hero. Don't do CD.

cheesysam 7y ago
What is 'request pinning, request tracing, request shifting'?
- thailor3 7y ago
  I'm asking myself the same thing... but I think he is referring to Load Balancing and Logging and maybe Public Key Pinning? Not sure... I'm however sure that Google and Facebook are not the only ones who do Load Balancing and Logging and therefore aren't the only ones who can benefit from CD :)
- notyourday 7y ago
  Being able to pin a set of requests to a specific path inside the infrastructure to they touch only specific instances running specific versions without adding "if blah-blah-blah" custom code into every deploy Being able to trace every request across the entire infrastructure including all sub-requests the original request triggered. Being able to observe issues pinned requests caused, automatically trigger an action when an error rate exceeds the threshold, typically removing the pinning.
jpdb 7y ago
There seems to be a misunderstanding regarding what Continuous Delivery (CD) is, as well as what is all required. CD doesn't necessarily refer to Deployment of Delivered artifacts. Instead, once code is merged back into your release branch (sometimes master branch, sometimes tag, sometimes an actual release branch), it should be made available to be launched to production. This doesn't mean more testing isn't required and it doesn't mean that humans are not involved. Continuous Deployment is the process of releasing software to production automatically. If you did in fact mean Continuous Deployment then you do not need 100% integration test coverage or anything of that nature. Typically, the process might work by releasing a canary deploy which receives a fraction of the traffic going to production. In the unlikely event a breaking change has silently made it through your other tests, it should likely be caught when it is deployed as a canary. If in the extremely unlikely scenario it makes it through both then the existing pipeline you have can be used to "roll-forward" a fix automatically instead of via the human process that is much more likely to fail. This may seem like a lot to you, but you are front-loading quite a bit of work and a mature pipeline is much less error prone than manual deploys.

gfs78 7y ago

On continuous delivery: "Given that all of the changes deployed are individual commits, the deployments are low risk and cause less bugs". I would like to know the source of this claim. I guess someone did an study on this...

inkeddeveloper 7y ago
I would likewise like to know the basis behind these claims. There have been countless instances when I've been reviewing a PR and found changes completely unrelated to the task at hand (user story or bug). One commit often has a scattering of changes that get lumped into one git add * git commit. In a disciplined world full of mindful developers, I could see this being a thing. But I have little faith this could be sustained in a majority of dev shops. I'm not trying to be negative Nancy but realistic Ron.
ses1984 7y ago
There's an implied "other things being equal" in there. Given the commits follow some normal distribution of quality and risk, it's less risky on average to apply one of those average commits than it is to apply a bunch of them. But if you try to deliver one giant risky commit, you're doing CD in name only.

digitalsushi 7y ago

Why is washing dishes as you cook so much easier than washing them a week later when the crust is difficult to remember what your code meant when you wrote it?