Perspectives on deploying to production

One of the things that I really appreciate about attending job interviews is the opportunity to learn what people from other organisations and industries consider to be challenges.

Take deployment as an example, some organisations are very particular about changing as little as possible on their production environments, whereas other organisations regard a complete replacement of the entire application server as the preferred approach to deploying updates.

From my recent experience disk space was quite limited and not much consideration had been given to externalising logfiles etc, so having a parallel version of the entire servlet container and activating the update by shutting down, changing a symbolic link, and then restarting was not an option.

As a result of the space limitation, our deployment process actually involved extracting a single changed file from a "platform" artifact and a sequence of manual copying steps.

No doubt the Continuous Delivery book will have some wisdom to be absorbed on this topic.

Continuous Delivery / DevOps

Something that I particularly enjoy about living in London is the time that I have each morning and evening during the commute between home and work for reading on the Underground.

One of the books that I am currently reading is Continuous Delivery - Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. I found the first chapter acted as a timely reminder for my recent resignation. To paraphrase, skillful and experienced team members getting bogged down with manual deployment processes doesn't make for a fun and productive environment.

The first half of this week has been dedicated to updating 7 existing websites, and launching a completely new one. So far it has been relatively painless, but tiring.