Behaviorally Speaking: Creating the Deployment Pipeline

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Creating the deployment pipeline.
By Bob Aiello

Continuous Delivery (CD) depends upon the successful implementation of a fully automated deployment pipeline. As a practitioner, I have heard many folks refer to CD in overly simplistic terms, creating a naive image of deployments being fully automated as a simple push button. The truth is that continuous delivery is anything but simple and it takes some effort to create a fully automated deployment pipeline. Continuous Delivery touches every aspect of the application lifecycle and is best created in an iterative manner. This article will help you get started with creating your fully automated continuous delivery pipeline.

The first thing that you need to understand about Continuous Delivery is that it is – well – continuous. This means that you need to consider every step of the process to create your application build, package and deployment. Some folks refer to continuous deployment and continuous delivery in the same sentence. In fact, I have seen DevOps thought leaders use these terms interchangeably. Continuous Deployment refers to being able to push changes as often as necessary. Continuous Deployment can be disruptive in that users are often not ready for a change. You should use continuous deployment when you must push out an urgent security patch – with or without the user’s consent. Continuous Delivery is more subtle in that changes are technically pushed to the target environment, but are hidden through a technique known as feature toggle where changes are hidden until they are ready to be exposed to end users. Continuous delivery helps reduce risk as changes are technically deployed and can be tested to some degree. Continuous delivery is less disruptive than continuous deployment because continuous deployment pushes changes whether or not the user is ready to accept them.

The deployment pipeline is the automated procedure that implements continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Most often, deployment procedures consist of shell scripts, which ensure that each step of the build, package and deployment is successfully completed without any errors. If you were to look at my scripts, you would see that more than half the code is testing each step and then logging the results. Mistakes happen and it is very common for one step in the deployment automation to not complete as expected. The deployment pipeline completely eliminates manual steps, but recognizes the reality that sometimes problems occur. If a step does not complete as expected, you want the deployment to fail immediately and notify the operator as to what has occurred. One challenge that often arises is how to handle reviewing and approving proposed changes. Agile and lean change control is an absolute must-have.

The secret to effective change control is to identify which changes are low risk and can be categorized as being preapproved. The remaining changes, by definition are a little more complicated, and should be reviewed and assessed for technical risk. The DevOps approach is to ensure that all of the subject matter experts (SMEs) are involved with the technical review process. It has been my experience that too often change control resembles a phone-tag game where change managers “represent” changes which they barely understand instead of ensuring that the SMEs are fully engaged with the technical review process. The deployment pipeline relies upon effective change control which employs agile and lean principles.

The deployment pipeline should pull source code from the version control system (VCS) based upon labeled (or tagged) baselines and built via a fully automated procedure – most often using Ant, Maven, Make or other build scripting language. Continuous integration servers such as Jenkins initiate the build, often triggered by the code being committed into a version control system. I try to script every single step using Ruby, Python or the available command line tools such as bash or, on windows, PowerShell. Remember that we build once and then deploy the same built components to each environment using the same automated procedures. The build process should also automatically generate the SHA1 or MD5 hashes which can be used to verify that each configuration item was successfully deployed to its target location and also later used to identify any unauthorized changes.

Infrastructure should always be built using automated procedures which is known as infrastructure as code. Managing configurations and environment dependencies also should be performed via automated procedures. It is important that deployment procedures be reliable and verifiable while also logging each step as it completes. The procedures should yield the same results no matter how many times they are run which is known as being idempotent.

Creating the deployment pipeline is not trivial and you may need to complete this effort in steps. I always focus on starting with attended automation where I do my best to automate each step and require that an operator look at the screen and verify that each step has completed successfully and then press enter. Over time, I may know enough to be able to fully automate the build, package and deployment as that magical “push button” that we all strive for, but in the meantime the steps I have outlined will significantly improve the reliability of your deployment process – eliminating many potential sources of error.

If you want to succeed in creating the deployment pipeline then start in small steps. Eliminate any possible sources of error. Manual steps will result in human error. Taking an agile iterative approach to creating the fully automated pipeline will help you deliver changes as often as necessary while ensuring security and reliability. May sure that you drop me a line and share your best practices for creating the deployment pipeline!