Continuous Deployment is gaining popularity with companies like Facebook and Etsy, but its successful implementation creates technical challenges and will require any team to make workflow changes. Learn how Kitchensurfing switched to continuous deployments and how they’ve grown from one deploy a week to 10+ deploys a day with zero downtime and zero worries, thanks to MongoDB. Hear about their workflow, the tools they use, and how they manage communication with product owners to make sure everyone is always in the loop.

1. CONTINUOUS
DEPLOYMENT
Lars Kluge, Hacker.

2. Previously CTO and Cofounder of Kitchensurfing.

3. DEFINITION

4. Continuous Deployment is the automated
process of shipping your product to
production, with every push to master.

5. MOTIVATION
Earlier feedback for your business: get features in front of
users as early as possible
Faster development: develop, push, next feature
Fewer merge conflicts
Lower the risk of deployments
Motivation for everyone involved: changes can be done
immediately--no wait for the next scheduled release

6. THE BIG PICTURE

8. WHO IS USING IT?
Facebook, Etsy, Quora, Linkedin, …

9. IS IT PRACTICAL FOR SMALLER STARTUPS?

10. YES.
We use it and love it at Kitchensurfing.

11. OUR STACK
Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, Heroku, …

12. OUR WORKFLOW

13. 1. Pick up a ticket in Pivotal Tracker
2. Code
3. Commit with reference to ticket id
4. Pull Request on Github
5. Code Review
6. Multiple Staging Environments if manual check necessary
7. CI: Codeship runs test suite for pull request
8. Merge into master
9. Github notifies Pivotal Tracker that ticket is merged
10. CI runs again
11. On successful build, Codeship deploys to Heroku
12. Release Notes Email sent by Heroku

14. OUR LEARNINGS

15. MONGODB HELPS.

16. NO SCHEMA.

17. ETSY
source

18. WITH MONGODB:
While (re)inventing your product,
no* schema migration necessary.

19. YOUNG PRODUCT = A LOT SCHEMA CHANGES

20. TRUST YOUR TEST SUITE

21. RELEASE BIG PRODUCTS IN SMALL PIECES

22. USE FEATURE FLAGS
Show new features only to your beta user group
Avoid the 'big bang' release

23. OBSERVE PRODUCTION AFTER DEPLOY
Not only exception tracking
How are business #s changing?
Cloud behavior
MMS Monitoring for MongoDB
New Relic

24. BEHAVIOR CHANGE
Is your team ready to make the behavior change?
The whole team needs to support it.
Introduce Continuous Deployment as early as possible; it's
getting harder down the road.

25. PRODUCT TEAM
How to break down features into small, easy to release
pieces? What is the order of operation?

26. COMMUNICATION
Keep your team in the loop
Release Notes Email
What is online, what's not?
Ticket finished, does it mean it's online?

27. RUNTIME OF TEST SUITE
> 15 Min. tricky
Context Switch is expensive for Engineers

28. HEROKU PREBOOT
$ heroku labs:enable -a myapp preboot

29. FUTURE PLANS
Better Release Notes Email based on finished stories in
Tracker
Statistics in Pull Request to understand the change based
on compiled JS, CSS size, test suite build time, # of database
queries, etc.
Engineering Dashboard: See how a deploy changes business
#s

30. THANK YOU.
larskluge.com
@aekym