Staging

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this Safe Software Deployment series, from the 180 Rule to Z Deployments to the Goldilocks Gauge. But there is an elephant in the room. Or should I say, a jabberwock. In Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass, Alice discovers that the mirror above her mantle is not a mirror at all, but a doorway to another world in which things work very differently. When developers push software from staging to production, they often have a similar experience. Though they want to believe that staging and production are the same, they discover that staging is not a mirror at all, and production is another world, in which things work very differently. And out of that distortion come bugs and outages. ...

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. ...