5 ms·

Do you ever release serious errors into prod?

Townley 5y ago
Sometimes, though thankfully less frequently (and for a less-disastrous definition of "serious") than I used to. Luckily, a good CI/CD pipeline makes reversions just as easy as deployments. So even when you have errors, it's easier to correct than if you suddenly discovered "our deployment bash script / ansible playbook isn't as reversible as we thought it was"
BatteryMountain 5y ago
The question is not IF, but WHEN. So ideally you have some kind of monitoring that reports/shows how many services are alive (and where they live in a cluster), how many errors they generate etc. Then based on some thresholds you can take them out of circulation and let them cool down. If certain kinds of errors occurs, or at a certain frequency, the system can notify a site reliability engineer (or equivalent) to check it out. Then they can decide if it should be permanently removed and to log an internal support ticket and so forth for the developers or product teams. Production issues are a part of life. You need to have some visibility on issues and their severity. Every company and tech stack is different, also depending on their SLA's and uptime promises. Ads not rendering in an app might be less severe than a pump failure at a fuel station, so they have different kinds of monitoring and and reaction times to faults. Obviously things like hospitals, banks, airlines/aircraft manufacturers have way different requirements and infrastructure from say a system that manages all school libraries for a state/province. There are too many products and approaches to mention here if you were looking for a list of those. I have one or two favorite approaches and a handful of tools for this kind of stuff, half of which is homemade, so not something you can google. But you can google it and see a few different approaches. "microservices monitoring java" or "microservices monitoring best practice" or something along those lines will get you on a path. Try to find 5 different approaches and reflect what each one is missing or how they may help you, and then ponder what would you like to see from a reporting system with hundreds/thousands of services. And then obviously the the best lessons will come from production itself. Good luck!
- killtimeatwork 5y ago
  > Production issues are a part of life. Only if you accept them. The alternative is to do very few, rigorously tested releases per year. This way you don't have production issues. That's how industries like banking make sure bank transfers and card payments work and people's money is not randomly lost... It's a shame many other industries just accept their product failing for users as something normal/inevitable.
  - lordgilman 5y ago
    I can't say my experience echoes your comment. I'm a former employer of a financial services (billing) company built around a mainframe code base started in the 70s. We probably qualify for the sort of business you had in mind with your comment. We did four releases a year, across the entire organization (so mainframe and more modern platforms), on Saturday nights/early Sunday mornings. There was plenty of testing but there was still plenty of errors only found on the day of, and rushed to fix in the wee hours or daylight hours of Sunday morning. The only thing that seemed to correlate with release quality was the overall risk of the release, i.e. the complexity and number of new features written during that quarter.
    - killtimeatwork 5y ago
      > We did four releases a year, across the entire organization (so mainframe and more modern platforms), on Saturday nights/early Sunday mornings. There was plenty of testing but there was still plenty of errors only found on the day of, and rushed to fix in the wee hours or daylight hours of Sunday morning. This way, you had bugs in prod for less than a day once every quarter, as opposed to having buggy prod all the time, as is common in organizations doing Continuous Deployment.
  - SkyBelow 5y ago
    Then you get the worst of both worlds. You are in an industry where few very well tested releases are needed to meet SLA and customer expectations, but you have enough of the company looking at entirely different industries and wanting to follow their pipeline instead.
ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
YES and this is why deployments to prod should go though many stages and have long bake-in time for critical applications. The idea of deploying every commit all the way to prod is is very questionable.
monster_group 5y ago
Rarely. All features are gated by feature flags with the capability to dial up the feature gradually and dial down the launch instantly. I can monitor if the feature launch is going as expected by monitoring errors and metrics in the logs.

Sometimes, though thankfully less frequently (and for a less-disastrous definition of "serious") than I used to. Luckily, a good CI/CD pipeline makes reversions just as easy as deployments. So even when you have errors, it's easier to correct than if you suddenly discovered "our deployment bash script / ansible playbook isn't as reversible as we thought it was"

BatteryMountain 5y ago

The question is not IF, but WHEN. So ideally you have some kind of monitoring that reports/shows how many services are alive (and where they live in a cluster), how many errors they generate etc. Then based on some thresholds you can take them out of circulation and let them cool down. If certain kinds of errors occurs, or at a certain frequency, the system can notify a site reliability engineer (or equivalent) to check it out. Then they can decide if it should be permanently removed and to log an internal support ticket and so forth for the developers or product teams. Production issues are a part of life. You need to have some visibility on issues and their severity. Every company and tech stack is different, also depending on their SLA's and uptime promises. Ads not rendering in an app might be less severe than a pump failure at a fuel station, so they have different kinds of monitoring and and reaction times to faults. Obviously things like hospitals, banks, airlines/aircraft manufacturers have way different requirements and infrastructure from say a system that manages all school libraries for a state/province. There are too many products and approaches to mention here if you were looking for a list of those. I have one or two favorite approaches and a handful of tools for this kind of stuff, half of which is homemade, so not something you can google. But you can google it and see a few different approaches. "microservices monitoring java" or "microservices monitoring best practice" or something along those lines will get you on a path. Try to find 5 different approaches and reflect what each one is missing or how they may help you, and then ponder what would you like to see from a reporting system with hundreds/thousands of services. And then obviously the the best lessons will come from production itself. Good luck!

killtimeatwork 5y ago
> Production issues are a part of life. Only if you accept them. The alternative is to do very few, rigorously tested releases per year. This way you don't have production issues. That's how industries like banking make sure bank transfers and card payments work and people's money is not randomly lost... It's a shame many other industries just accept their product failing for users as something normal/inevitable.
- lordgilman 5y ago
  I can't say my experience echoes your comment. I'm a former employer of a financial services (billing) company built around a mainframe code base started in the 70s. We probably qualify for the sort of business you had in mind with your comment. We did four releases a year, across the entire organization (so mainframe and more modern platforms), on Saturday nights/early Sunday mornings. There was plenty of testing but there was still plenty of errors only found on the day of, and rushed to fix in the wee hours or daylight hours of Sunday morning. The only thing that seemed to correlate with release quality was the overall risk of the release, i.e. the complexity and number of new features written during that quarter.
  - killtimeatwork 5y ago
    > We did four releases a year, across the entire organization (so mainframe and more modern platforms), on Saturday nights/early Sunday mornings. There was plenty of testing but there was still plenty of errors only found on the day of, and rushed to fix in the wee hours or daylight hours of Sunday morning. This way, you had bugs in prod for less than a day once every quarter, as opposed to having buggy prod all the time, as is common in organizations doing Continuous Deployment.
- SkyBelow 5y ago
  Then you get the worst of both worlds. You are in an industry where few very well tested releases are needed to meet SLA and customer expectations, but you have enough of the company looking at entirely different industries and wanting to follow their pipeline instead.

ex_amazon_sde 5y ago

YES and this is why deployments to prod should go though many stages and have long bake-in time for critical applications. The idea of deploying every commit all the way to prod is is very questionable.

monster_group 5y ago

Rarely. All features are gated by feature flags with the capability to dial up the feature gradually and dial down the launch instantly. I can monitor if the feature launch is going as expected by monitoring errors and metrics in the logs.