Rollback

If you’ve gotten this far in my Safe Software Deployment series, you know how scary deployment day can be. Sleepless nights. Knots in the stomach. Cold sweats. These are the symptoms of uncertainty. And three decades of experience have taught me that all the positive thinking in the world won’t ensure a bug-free deployment. That’s why I’ve developed a number of techniques that can consistently help teams minimize fear and achieve safe software deployment. In the last post, we discussed the 180 Rule. The purpose of this post is to explain how you can use “Z Deployments” to mitigate both fear and downtime. In future posts, we’ll look at both the Goldilocks Gauge and Through the Looking Glass. ...

In my last post, I talked about the anxiety developers feel when they deploy software, and the negative impact that fear has on innovation. Today, I’m offering the first of four methods I’ve used to help teams overcome that fear: The 180 Rule. Developers need to be able to get software into production, and if it doesn’t work, back it out of production as quickly as possible and return the system to its prior working state. If they have confidence that they can detect problems and fix them, they can feel more confident about deploying. ...