Question

My team and I would like to implement “Continuous Deployment“ for our website. Continuous Deployment basically means deploying to production very frequently (multiple times a day). Supposedly Etsy does this all the time.

Our environment is Tomcat + Nginx. We already do Continuous deployment of any code change to our snapshot server (ie traditional continuous integration) using Hudson and a Hudson+Cargo plugin that hot deploys.

Surprisingly that works well (albeit over time we have to restart tomcat sometimes).

For production this is not going to work because we can’t have the website down.
I have some ideas like having two web apps and redirecting while one is down.

Anybody have any ideas or has done this before in a real production environment?

Answer 1

From http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/continuous-deployment-5-eas.html:

Real-time alerting. No matter how good your deployment process, bugs can still get through. The most annoying variety are bugs that don’t manifest until hours or days after the code that caused them is deployed. To catch those nasty bugs, you need a monitoring platform that can let you know when things have gone awry, and get a human being involved in debugging them.

To effectively implement continuous deployment to production, you need good monitoring, otherwise you will not understand what is happening with your application.