experience & info Gerd Saurer on 05 Jan 2008 01:13 am
Lets catch a shipment train
I was posting about the JAOO 2007 several time ago and would like to share an other experience i had there. On Monday I had lunch with Wayne Fenton from ebay where he explained their deployment strategy to me.
The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work - there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.
