How often do you want to deploy to production? Weekly, daily, maybe as soon as possible? In this article, we are going to discuss an approach to deliver fast to production by using feature environments and a release process.
Feature Environments
A feature environment is a feature branch deployed in an ephemeral environment, which enables automated tests a nd QA to test that feature in isolation , before deploying to production [1]. It's a separate staging environment for each feature branch, allowing fast delivery of the features.
Figure 1 demonstrates the concept and process of feature environments.
- Rollback process:. There should be a rollback process (even manual) to roll back a production deployment. Blue-Green deployments can also help here.
- Feature flags:. As a production deployment rollback can be a bit drastic and dangerous (mainly if it involves schema or data changes), feature flags can help if we just need to disable the new feature that has just been deployed.
- Monitoring and observability:. We should be able to know quickly if something is not right in production and react fast.
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