In some situations development teams are deploying some of the production systems from local, yes from their local laptops. that’s is a not recommended practice as it causes issues in prod.
Why developers modify from their local laptop?
There can be a few resources for why deploying new code and modifying production config is done from local laptop, here are a few examples
- No CI pipelines
- Failed CI pipeline
- Just bad practice
In any case it is not recommended to modify production systems from local laptop and it’s better to use CI tools.
How to modify production systems?
When you update production with new code/config or new services the downtime should be zero.
for a successful deployment to production you’ll need to adopt a few approaches
Git Ops
In summary this means that every modification will be committed to your Git repository.
Infrastructure as code
In summary this means that the creation and update of the infrastructure should be declared in code/template.
CI Pipeline
When a commit is made to the relevant repository Git sends a hook to the CI system to start the CI pipeline, this will initiate: build > test > deploy
when the CI pipeline is complete we know that the build, tests and deploy successfully as expected. (DevOps outcome should be expected for every pipeline)
Note: there’s another step of release that “enable” the actual new code, and this is done via feature toggle.
Deployment to production
This is where the deployment strategy comes, obviously force-deploy will shutdown the services and start the services again (downtime)
we’ll need a better approach like blue-green that will create another group of resources with the new code and only after its active the current requests/traffic will be redirected to the new group of services.
after the deploy is OK the old resources can be deleted.
Debugging
To verify that the deploy is OK
- check your metrics and logs
- check that the service is operational (can be done via automated QA)
Summary
Do not be tempted to deploy from local laptop as this will cause issues and it will not be registered in logs or as a commit.
Use CI pipeline!