Gradual Deployment in Practice: Experiences from an Industrial Case Study

摘要

Short and rapid software development cycles have encouraged deploying software more frequently than ever before. At the same time, much of the features of the software being designed rely on services that cannot be set up for testing configurations, but are constantly live and in production. This has inspired a development approach where new features are gradually deployed, so that they can be tested live, but with limited influence if something goes wrong with the deployment. Putting such an approach to practice requires tools for managing the different software versions as well as their deployment and operations. In this paper, we present a case study on gradual deployment of new versions to a web computing system, executed at a Finnish software company. Furthermore, we also present a proof-of-concept implementation of a tool, which enabled gradual deployment to a cluster-based runtime environment. With this tool it was possible to deploy a new version of a software to a specific group of users or to rollback a deployment automatically in the company cluster environment.