It is important that when working with customers that the architecture is defined and clear in everyone’s mind, I have created this diagram to show the various different areas of the architecture.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Deployments Best Practices
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Workflow
- Development Environment
- Staging Environment
- Production Environment
- Permissions
- Conclusion
Introduction
This guide is aimed to help you better understand how to deal with deployments in your development workflow and provide some best practices. Sometimes a bad production deployment can ruin all the effort you have invested in a development process. Having a solid deployment workflow can become one of the greatest advantages of your team.
Before you start, I recommend reading our Developing and Deploying with Branches guide first to get a general idea of how branches should be setup in your repository to be able to fully utilize tips from this guide. It’s a great read!
Note on Development Branch
In this guide you will see a lot of references to a branch called development. In your repository you can use master (Git), trunk (Subversion) or default (Mercurial) for the same purpose, there’s no need to create a branch specifically called “development”. I chose this name because it’s universal for all version control systems.
The Workflow
Deployments should be treated as part of a development workflow, not as an afterthought. If you are developing a web site or an application, your workflow will usually include at least three environments: Development, Staging and Production. In that case the workflow might look like this:
- Developers work on bugs and features in separate branches. Really minor updates can be committed directly to the stable development branch.
- Once features are implemented, they are merged into the staging branch and deployed to the Staging environment for quality assurance and testing.
- Once testing is complete, feature branches are merged into the development branch.
- On the release date, the development branch is merged into production and then deployed to the Production environment.
Let’s take a closer look at each environment to see what are the most efficient way to deploy each one of them.
Development Environment
If you make web applications, you don’t need a remote development environment, every developer should have their own local setup.
Many customers have Development environments set up with automatic deployments on every commit or push. While this gives developers a small advantage of not installing the site or the application on their computers to perform testing locally, it also wastes a lot of time. Every tiny change must be committed, pushed, deployed, and only then it can be verified. If the change was made by mistake, a developer will have to revert it, push it, then redeploy.
Testing on a local computer removes the need to commit, push and deploy completely. Every change can be verified locally first, then, once it’s more or less stable, it can be pushed to a Staging environment for proper quality assurance testing.
However, what this does provide, is an environment that can ensure the auto-deployment to environment is successful and runs in an independent installation process far removed from the developers’ environment.
We do not recommend using deployments for rapidly changing development environments. Running your software locally is the best choice for that sort of testing.
We recommend to deploy to the development environment automatically on every commit or push. This will ensure that the build process is full working.
Staging Environment
Once the features are implemented and considered fairly stable, they get merged into the staging branch and then automatically deployed to the Staging environment. This is when quality assurance kicks in: testers go to staging servers and verify that the code works as intended.
It is very handy to have a separate branch called staging to represent your staging environment. It will allow developers to deploy multiple branches to the same server simultaneously, simply by merging everything that needs to be deployed to the staging branch. It will also help testers understand what exactly is on staging servers at the moment, just by looking inside the staging branch.
We recommend always deploying major releases to staging at a scheduled time, of which the whole team is aware of.
Production Environment
Once the feature is implemented and tested, it can be deployed to production. If the feature was implemented in a separate branch, it should be merged into a stable development branch first. The branches should be deleted after they are merged to avoid confusion between team members.
The next step is to make a to show the difference between the production and development branches to take a quick look at the code that will be deployed to production. This gives you one last chance to spot something that’s not ready or not intended for production. Things like debugger breakpoints, verbose logging or incomplete features.
Once the diff review is finished, you can merge the development branch into production and then initialize a deployment of the production branch to your production environment by hand. Specify a meaningful message for your deployment so that your team knows exactly what you deployed.
Make sure to only merge development branch into production when you actually plan to deploy. Don’t merge anything into production in advance. Merging on time will make files in your production branch match files on your actual production servers and will help everyone better understand the state of your production environment.
We recommend always deploying major releases to production at a scheduled time, this should be a MANUALLY process not automated (This can be as simple as clicking a link to start the process going or moving some files, it just needs to be a human who activates the process), of which the whole team is aware of. Find the time when your application is least active and use that time to roll out updates. This may sound obvious, but make sure that it’s not too late in the day, because someone needs to be around after the deployment for at least a few hours to monitor the application and make sure the deployment went fine. Urgent production fixes can be deployed at any time.
After deployment finishes make sure to verify it. It is best to check all the features or fixes that you deployed to make sure they work properly in production. It is a big win if your deployment tool can send an email to all team members with a summary of changes after every deployment. This helps team members to understand what exactly went live and how to communicate it to customers. Beanstalk does this for you automatically.
Your deployment to production is now complete, time to pop champagne and celebrate with your team!
Rolling Back
Sometimes deployments don’t go as planned and things break. In that case you have the possibility to rollback. However, you should be as careful with rollbacks as with production deployments themselves. Sometimes a rollback brings more havoc than the issue it was trying to fix. So first of all stay calm and don’t make any sudden moves. Before performing a rollback, answer the following questions:
Did it break because of the code that I deployed, or did something else break?
You can only rollback files that you deployed, so if the source of the issues is something else a rollback won’t be much help.
Is it possible to rollback this release?
Not all releases can be rolled back. Sometimes a release introduces a new database structure that is incompatible with the previous release. In that case if your rollback, your application will break.
If the answer to both questions is “yes”, you can rollback safely. After rollback is done, make sure to fix the bug that you discovered and commit it to either the development branch (if it was minor) or a separate bug-fix branch. Then proceed with the regular bug-fix branch → staging; bug-fix → development → production integration workflow.
Deploying Urgent Fixes
Sometimes you need to deploy a bug-fix to production quickly, when your development branch is not ready for release yet. The workflow in that case stays the same as described above, but instead of merging the development branch into production you actually merge your bug-fix branch first into the development branch, then separately into production, without merging development into production. Then deploy the production branch as usual. This will ensure that only your bug-fix will be deployed to the production environment without all the other stuff from the development branch that’s not ready yet.
It is important to merge the bug-fix branch to both the development and production branches in this case, because your production branch should never include anything that doesn’t exist in your stable development branch. The development branch is where developers work all day, so if your fix is only in the production branch they will never see it and it can cause confusion.
Automatic Deployments to Production?
I can’t stress enough how important it is for all production deployments to be performed and verified by a responsible human being. Using automatic deployments for Production environment is dangerous and can lead to unexpected results. If every commit is deployed to your production site automatically, imagine what happens when someone commits something by mistake or commits an incomplete feature in the middle of the night when the rest of the team is sleeping? Using automatic deployments makes your Production environment very vulnerable. Please don’t do that, always deploy to production manually.
Permissions
Every developer should be able to deploy to the Staging environment. They just need to make sure they don’t overwrite each other’s changes when they do. That’s exactly why the staging branch is a great help: all changes from all developers are getting merged into it so it contains all of them.
Your Production environment, ideally, should only be accessible to a limited number of experienced developers. These guys should always be prepared to fix the servers immediately after a deployment went rogue.
Conclusion
We’ve been using this workflow with many customers for many years to deploy their application. Some of these things were learned the hard way, through broken production servers. Following these guidelines and all production deployments will become incredibly smooth and won’t cause any stress at all.
Developing and Deploying with Branches
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Coding in master/trunk “branches”
- Branching Workflow
- Further Reading: Branching with Beanstalk
Introduction
Getting started with Version Control can be an eye-opening experience. You may have already said to yourself, “How did I work without this?”
. Now that you’ve got the basics of Version Control down, you want to start getting really productive by continuing to improve your workflow. Your next step is learning to code in branches.
Coding in branches is a simple practice that keeps you and your work more organised. Branches let you easily maintain your “in-progress” work separately from your completed, tested, and stable code. Not only is this an effective way to collaborate with others, but it will also allow you to automate the deployment of updates, when needed and fixes to your servers.
Coding in master/trunk “branches”
Even if you don’t know how to use branching in your development process, you’ve already been using a branch just by committing your code to version control. In all major version control systems, each repository contains at least one branch by default, your working branch:
- in Subversion this is a folder called
trunk, - in Git this is a branch called
master.
Without configuring anything, your first commit to any repository will be made to this working branch.
Each version control system has a different approach to creating, merging, and deleting branches. We’ll be focusing on overall development process, and suggest that you refer to the documentation of your preferred VCS for specific details about commands:
Branching Workflow
Using branches can seem complicated without some guidance. We’re going to help you by focusing on two specific uses for branches and the benefits of having them in your workflow.
Benefits of Branches: Building Features & Fixing Bugs
Most coding falls into one of these two categories: you’re either building new features or fixing bugs in an existing codebase. A problem occurs when those two things need to be happen at the same time.
Imagine that you’ve recently launched big Feature X. Things are going well at first, so you move on to start the next task on your to-do list, awesome Feature Y. You start coding and committing changes to your repository, but along the way discover a problem with big Feature X that you need to fix right away. What do you do?
If all of your work is being done in the default working branch of your repository, you’ll need to figure out how to save the work you’ve done so far on Feature Y, revert your repository to the state it was in when you deployed Feature X, make your fix, and then re-introduce your work from Feature Y. This is messy, and you could potentially lose some of your work or introduce new bugs.
Instead, you should be doing all of your work in a feature or bug-fix branches and let the VCS do the hard work for you. You would branch your repository from the point where Feature X was deployed, creating an alternate working copy for you to do new work on. Your Feature Y branch includes the entire repository’s history and code, but a separate history “starts” from the moment the branch is created. This allows you to work on the Feature Y branch, committing to your hearts content, without disturbing the code that you deployed to release Feature X.
Only once the feature is tested and complete, ready for deployment, you can merge that branch back into your main working branch.
This also means you can switch between a feature branch to the default working branch any time to create new branches from that point – like the bug-fix that you need to make. After switching back to the working branch, you would create a bug-fix branch. Working on the bug-fix in its own branch might not seem necessary if the fix is small, but following this practice will help you avoid situations where small bug-fixes turn into bigger bug-fixes, potentially leaving your working branch in a messy state.
Best Practices with Feature & Bug Branches
- Try to avoid committing unfinished work to your repository’s default working branch.
- Create a branch any time you begin non-trivial work including features and complex bug-fixes.
- Don’t forget to delete feature branches once they were merged into stable branch. This will keep your repository clean.
Benefits of Branching: Server Environment Branches
Another reason to use version control is so that you can use your repository as the source to deploy code to your servers. Much like feature and bug-fix branches, environment branches make it easy for you to separate your in-progress code from your stable code. Using environment branches and deploying from them means you will always know exactly what code is running on your servers in each of your environments.
We’ve been talking about your “default working branch” – but you can also think of this as your development environment branch. It’s a good idea to keep this branch clean – this is easily done by using feature and bug-fix branches and only merging them back to your development branch once they are tested. In other words, at any point in time your development branch should contain only stable code. Therefore, we will be using the name “stable” from now on in this guide to refer to this branch.
Using Production and Staging Branches
In addition to your development environment, you’re likely to have at least one other environment:production, where your website or application actually runs. Having a production environment branch and making that the only source of code that goes to production ensures that you have a snapshot of what is on your production server at any time, and a granular history of what’s been added to production and when.
In most cases you will have a staging environment as well, where your team or clients can review changes together. Having a staging environment branch will help you keep that environment with the same benefits as a production branch.
Diff Branches for Easy Code Review & Release Notes
When your development environment has been updated with features and bug-fixes that are tested, you can use your VCS to do a diff between your stable branch and staging branch to see what would be deployed that’s not currently on staging. This is a great opportunity to look for low quality or incomplete code, debug code, and other development leftovers that shouldn’t be deployed. This diff can also be helpful in writing your release notes.
Never Merge to Environment Branches Without Deploying
In order to keep your environment branches in sync with the environments, it’s a best practice to only execute a merge into an environment branch at the time you intend to deploy. If you complete a merge without deploying, your environment branch will be out of sync with your actual production environment.
With environment branches, you never want to commit changes directly to the branch. By only merging code from your stable branch into staging or production branches, you ensure that changes are flowing in one direction: from feature and bug-fix branches to stable and staging environments, and from stable to production. This keeps your history clean, and again, lets you be confident about knowing what code is running in which environments.
Best Practices with Environment Branches
- Use your repository’s default working branch as your “stable” branch.
- Create a branch for each environment, including staging and production.
- Never merge into an environment branch unless you are ready to deploy to that environment.
- Perform a diff between branches before merging—this can help prevent merging something that wasn’t intended, and can also help with writing release notes.
- Merges should only flow in one direction: first from feature to staging for testing; then from feature to stable once tested; then from stable to production to ship.
Further Reading: Branching with Beanstalk
This is just an overview of some of the most common practices for using branches in version control. If you’re using Beanstalk, we’ve included some resources to help you take advantage of branching.
Visual Studio Team Services Security
Using Azure can open up a can of worm around security and many customers have many concerns
Microsoft do a lot of things to keep your Team Service project safe and secure, refer to this link for details: Visual Studio Team Services Data Protection Overview.
You can deploy your own build agent which you can have full control and easy to configure your machines to only accept the deployment from that build agent.
Another URL link I found from Microsoft Virtual Learning which might be useful:
Getting Started with Azure Security for the IT Professional
Do IT security concerns keep you up at night? You’re not alone! Many IT Pros want to extend their organization’s infrastructure but need reassurance about security. Whether you are researching a hybrid or a public cloud model with Microsoft Azure, the question remains the same: Does the solution meet your own personal and your organization’s bar for security, including industry standards, attestations, and ISO certifications? In this demo-filled course, explore these and other hot topics, as a team of security experts and Azure engineers takes you beyond the basic certifications and explores what’s possible inside Azure. See how to design and use various technologies to ensure that you have the security and architecture you need to successfully launch your projects in the cloud. Dive into datacenter operations, virtual machine (VM) configuration, network architecture, and storage infrastructure. Get the information and the confidence you need, from the pros who know, as they demystify security in the cloud.
This article is very useful is you need to deploy from a remote server
Configuring on-premises Build server for Visual Studio Online
Azure Security Center
It is important that when using Azure that you take security very seriously, I’ve been looking around to see if I can get together as much information as I can to help businesses protect the environments that they relay on so much to run their businesses.
I found these short introductions to Azure Security Center which are worth looking over:
Introduction to Azure Security Center
A brief overview of how Azure Security Center helps you protect, detect and respond to cybersecurity threats.
Azure Security Center Overview
With Azure Security Center, you get a central view of the security state of all of your Azure resources. At a glance, verify that the appropriate security controls are in place and configured correctly. Scott talks to Sara Fender who explains it all!
Azure Security Center – Threat Detection
With Azure Security Center, you get a central view of the security state of all of your Azure resources. At a glance, verify that the appropriate security controls are in place and configured correctly. Scott talks to Sarah Fender who explains how Security Center integrates Threat Detection.
Azure Security Center – Focus on Prevention
Staying ahead of current and emerging threats requires an integrated, analytics-driven approach. By combining Microsoft global threat intelligence and expertise with insights into security-related events across your Azure deployments, Security Center helps you detect actual threats early, and it reduces false positives. Scott talks to Sara Fender who breaks down the details.