Deployment strategies

Every deployment strategy is a way of buying information before you are fully committed. They differ in what they cost and how much they tell you.

The question that decides everything: how quickly can you undo it, and what does undo not cover? A strategy without a tested rollback is not a strategy.

1. Separate deploy from release

The most useful idea here, and the one that unlocks the rest. Deploying is shipping the code; releasing is turning the behaviour on. When they are the same event, every deploy is risky and every rollback is a deploy.

Split them with a flag, and you can ship code continuously, turn a feature on for one account, and turn it off in seconds without a build.

Done when: you can change behaviour without shipping code.