When new software is developed, there's always a day it is finally released to the world. Deployment puts it in front of everyone’s eyes, so it’s both the most exciting and most feared moment of any software development cycle. What is something goes wrong?
But everything goes right if the team uses the right approaches. In addition to key DevOps principles, there are specific best practices for software deployment.
Software deployment best practices
Deployment automation
A good deployment practice is to automate as many steps as possible. Entrust the deployment to the reliable machine mind! This significantly reduces deployment time, takes away the risk of human error, and makes the results more predictable. Deployment scripts, continuous integration servers, automated deployment tools, and much more can be helpful here.
Deployment checklist
Checklists in every sphere of life make sure that nothing is forgotten. The deployment process is no exception. A checklist formally defines the steps and reminds the team of possibly overlooked ones. The checklist should be available to all team members through the collaboration software (for example, Confluence). It also helps you improve the process based on the team members’ and/or customer’s feedback, which is fully in line with the Agile methodology.
Backup & rollback strategy
It’s better to be on the safe side. For safe deployments, an essential practice is to always have a “Plan B.” If something goes wrong, the team needs to know they can roll back to the previous working version of the software. This requires regular backups of the previous builds together with the dependencies and configuration. The backup and rollback strategy is a good task for version control systems (e.g. GIT).
Continuous Integration (CI)
Merging the code changes of multiple developers into a single repository several times a day is a job for Continuous Integration or CI. Every change triggers a build with automatic tests performed. With this approach, bugs have minimum changes to “slip” to production. To use this practice, it is necessary to set up a continuous integration server. Helpful tools here include Bamboo, CircleCI, Jenkins, Travis, etc.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Is your software really ready for deployment? It will be with the Continuous Delivery practice! Continuous Delivery makes sure all code changes are automatically prepared to be deployed to production. The code is ready to be released at any time at a click of a button, and it has passed standardized tests. By deploying more often, the team has a chance to troubleshoot errors.
Proper communication
People involved in the deployment process need to communicate perfectly. This is another vital deployment practice. They should be regularly notified of key steps, release progress, build failures, and things like this. Weekly meetings are not enough here. With relevant software integration, the alerts can be made automatic.
Helpful deployment tools
The right tools determine the deployment success. They can be in the area of automation, configuration management, collaboration, automatic alerts, continuous integration, and so on. There are tools to fit every budget and every project needs. Jenkins, TeamCity, RapidDeploy, PDQ, AWS CodeDeploy, Bamboo, Octopus Deploy, Deploy, Codeship, Travis CI, Ansible Tower are just the beginning of the endless list.
Let your deployments be the smoothest!
Always cooperate with a development team that uses software deployment best practices, and you will be assured with reliable results. Our website development firm respects the standards and best recommendations in all processes. In addition, we offer DevOps services that can help you streamline your development lifecycles. Drop us a line!