Nowadays it is essential to be able to deploy to production in a reasonably short amount of time and in an automated manner. In this post, I want to summarize my experience with creating deployment pipelines and I will try to provide as many details as possible, despite the broad topic. I will focus on two concrete tools I have used in the past years – TeamCity and Octopus Deploy, which have helped me create automated deployment pipelines.
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Load balancers can much more
Load balancing is a popular technique when you need to be able to serve thousands and more concurrent requests in a reliable manner. Load balancers distribute incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers (a.k.a. server pool or server farm) to increase throughput. Although many people associate load balancing primarily with the higher throughput, this technique can be used in other important scenarios as well.
The power of feature toggles
Many organizations employ a complex deployment process where every code change has to go through a series of different steps in order to reach the production environment. This is typically due to organizational rules, which require many people to approve the deployment. The result is a big package with many updates to the code that is supposed to be deployed at once. At deployment time the level of stress rises drastically, as there often are unexpected errors – missing configurations, misunderstandings in the team, or special (not well-tested) scenarios. Moreover, if the deployment fails, it needs to be rolled back, which could be a painful process.