On 02/20/2013 12:15 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I think there is a lot of ground to cover before we get more continuous deployments, but what were you thinking we needed?
A simpler and faster deployment process. The part of the process when supervision is needed shouldn't, in my opinion, take more than 15 minutes (or less). Later, populating everything to all the machines should be fully automatic and not require any kind of human supervision. A report should be generated at the end. If something goes wrong, then an alert should be sent to someone responsible.
I never deployed on that scale before but I did read a bit how other projects deal with this and talked to some people. Definitely, a staging environment which mirrors production would help a lot. I hope we'll get there soon.
I know that Facebook has something like an internal bleeding edge version that is used by their employees. It works with the same database as the official Facebook so employees can use it just like they would use Facebook any day. This gives them an opportunity to test many things manually before they go live for millions of people without actually wasting time on boring testing, but just by using the product. I don't know the details but I think they sync the production with bleeding edge once or twice a week.