Today was fun. A lot of fun! I paired all day today with Jared Hunter from operations and we spent all day deploying about four applications written in three different languages to two different environments using three different deployment tools. And today’s attempts have made me realise a lot of things

….

OK fine, I am lying. It wasn’t a lot of things!!!

But this experience has made me realise a few things!

Operations are over worked. I knew this fact of course. I knew this in the same sense as I know getting shot or being stabbed hurts. There is a lot of difference between knowing and realising. We spent nearly two hours in total debugging failed deployment because certain assumptions were made in the applications which did not coincide across all environments. Sometimes the environments were at fault, sometimes the applications.

I have learnt that one cannot leave deployment towards the end of the iteration. It must be planned at the same time as when we kick our iteration off. When we discuss the work planned in the iteration, it is at that point, we must write our deployment notes, and keep adding to them as work keeps getting done. The deployment notes should be nothing less than a technical card and must be approached by the business in the exact same way as developer asking to remove some technical debt.

The problem with leaving deployment planning towards the end of the iteration is that people have to now remember work they did at the start. Do it at the same time as you hand over the card to QA and you are done with it; no more chasing up after the fact.

I have learnt that having consistent deployment procedures when you deploy applications written in three different languages is not possible. Layers and layers of decoration buffers must be applied between the deployment procedure and the applications for that to happen and God help you if you have to then debug something. Java is very different from Ruby and Perl. And even though the latter are both interpreted, the way they manage dependencies and interact with other system layers is different. At least the way we do it. Choose one platform, if you can, and stick with it, if you can. It makes deployment, debugging, rollbacks and dependencies much much easier.

I learnt Puppet is very cool. I managed to give access to a bunch of users across different environments, documented the change and kept the history of the change for posterity using puppet in a few simple steps. I will however have to shelve my idea of using Babushka and Puppet together. (I think I had had too much coffee at that time).

Last thing I learnt is that canadians have a very good sense of humour, no matter how much you needle them about maple syrup, or ice hockey or you know, basically being Canadian. They are a lot of fun to work with! Mad props to Jared and Kerri for giving me that belief. Come to think of it, even the tree we associate with Canada, the Maple tree and the tree associated with Kashmir, the Chinar tree are similar.