CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/ch1a 4 RW: Difference between revisions
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Continuous delivery demands ability to automate deployment on production and create environment that can support frequent deployments. One of the challenges of automated deployment is to take software from test environment to live production. The new update may include a change in database schema as well. Updating existing production database server without bring application down, is an arduous and risky task. Many business domains expect a minimum downtime for such updates, while maintaining a need for continuous delivery. | Continuous delivery demands ability to automate deployment on production and create environment that can support frequent deployments. One of the challenges of automated deployment is to take software from test environment to live production. The new update may include a change in database schema as well. Updating existing production database server without bring application down, is an arduous and risky task. Many business domains expect a minimum downtime for such updates, while maintaining a need for continuous delivery. | ||
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Blue-Green deployment provides a solution by using two nearly identical production environments. One environment, which is in production at the moment is called Blue and other environment is called Green. | Blue-Green deployment provides a solution for continuous delivery by using two nearly identical production environments. One environment, which is in production at the moment is called Blue and other environment is called Green. | ||
Revision as of 00:51, 2 February 2015
Blue-Green Deployment
Blue-Green deployment is a technique used to reduce risk and delay in continuous integration. It uses an exact copy of production environment, where new changes can be deployed and production testing can be done. After running successful tests, we can just point router to this copy and make it production. In case of any error in system after this step, we can roll back by re-pointing router to old application instance. This process reduces the production downtime during migration and expedite any rollback operation in case of error in production to last successful build.
Background
Software applications are becoming more and more complex nowadays. Software development life cycle is trying to adapt to this new paradigm by implementing ways to release new features/updates as frequently as they can be conceptualized. Agile methodology has reduced time for release of new piece of code. With application changes going into production at such a remarkable frequency, a need was felt to automate production deployment. More and more software development houses are using Continuous Integration (CI) nowadays. In continuous integration, a new piece of software is easily integrated into existing application code, and tested to make it ready for release. With continuous integration becoming a norm, continuous delivery is becoming a necessity. As per Martin Fowler, "Continuous Delivery is a software development discipline where you build software in such a way that the software can be released to production at any time". On an average, Amazon is pushing changes to production every 11.6 seconds. Google and Facebook are releasing frequent changes to production.
Continuous delivery demands ability to automate deployment on production and create environment that can support frequent deployments. One of the challenges of automated deployment is to take software from test environment to live production. The new update may include a change in database schema as well. Updating existing production database server without bring application down, is an arduous and risky task. Many business domains expect a minimum downtime for such updates, while maintaining a need for continuous delivery.
Blue-Green deployment provides a solution for continuous delivery by using two nearly identical production environments. One environment, which is in production at the moment is called Blue and other environment is called Green.