7 ms·

Weekend deployments are for chumps

93 points by rockhymas 16y ago

TamDenholm 16y ago
I work for web dev agencies and it surprises me just how often they launch on a Friday afternoon despite how every single developer pleads with them that its an absolutely awful idea. Golden rule, Never launch on a Friday. Personally i've found it easy to persuade clients to do this once you say it'll cost an extra ten grand just for the privilege of a friday launch.
andrewvc 16y ago
I agree that weekend deploys are a shitty idea, but isn't the real issue here not being able to roll back?
- gecko 16y ago
  Probably? I'm welcome to be schooled here. 90% of the time, we can roll back instantly, because there were no database changes. 5% of the time, we can roll back with slightly more pain, because the database migrations were reversible. In this case, the database migration was not reversible. If we'd noticed immediately, we could still have just activated snapshots, but we didn't notice until 20 hours later. What do others do in this situation?
  - peterwwillis 16y ago
    Wait. What blew up that it took someone 20 hours to realize? The first thing you take from that is, don't do anything without double-checking your change to make sure it worked. In terms of rollback, just don't do anything which isn't reversible. Taking chances with your changes is taking chances with your business. If you don't know how to rollback whatever you're doing, ask someone who does (there is always a way to roll back or add redundancy).
    - tedunangst 16y ago
      "The failed API call turns out to be one that’s trivially cached for a very long time, and so is one that Kiln would allow to fail without actually dying."
patio11 16y ago
I feel for you. On the plus side, process improvements to prevent it from happening next time are exactly how you should respond to things like this. One which has saved my bacon numerous times is investing a few hours into tweaking monitoring and alert systems. I hear PagerDuty exists to help with this. I use a bunch of scripts and bubblegum, and even that caught 10 of the last 12 big problems. Queuing systems dying has hosed me many times over the years, for example, and a borked deploy which causes that would have my phone ringing before I got my laptop closed.
mgrouchy 16y ago
I'm lucky to run a system that is small enough that an entire deploy consists of around 2 seconds of downtime for the server to restart and start the new instance of the application. We deploy new versions side by side and then then the webserver points at the new application on restart. Only time it takes any longer is when there are sweeping database changes(schedule the downtime, inspect snapshots incase of issues, etc.)
adamzochowski 16y ago
I was taught that Thursdays are best for deployment because you got Friday to fix stupid things, and then weekend to fix the terrible things. By Monday all is working anyways. And best of all, Friday people are generally happy (it is last day of the week), respectively on Monday expect grumpy users.
- _pius 16y ago
  Isn't that a Monday launch? :)
- nollidge 16y ago
  > Friday people are generally happy Not if they're trying to get that last thing done before they can go home. :)
Hominem 16y ago
Oh god. I release 5pm pacific every week because users "can't have a single second" of downtime. We manually test an ever growling checklist fo functionality. There is always, always an issue. The angry emails start to roll in around 5:15 pacific.
swombat 16y ago
Wait, what? You have large numbers of paying customers to whom you're delivering a mission-critical system (source control isn't exactly optional), and your releases involve neither automated production monitoring/continuous deployment nor formal release procedures? I think your problem is more than just weekend deployments! My full comments here: http://swombat.com/2011/3/8/fog-creek-dont-do-cowboy-deployments http://swombat.com/2011/3/8/fog-creek-dont-do-cowboy-deploym...
- sghael 16y ago
  I agree. My other thought was 'isn't there a staging server in there somewhere?' Something that is near identical to production, with fake production data, etc, that could surface the problem before a customer sees it. btw, props to Fog Creek and OP for airing their dirty laundry. They take some heat, but in the end we all learn from it.
  - gecko 16y ago
    We have more than staging servers: we have staging accounts. I documented our full release process at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  Maybe in the future we can all be IMVU: Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/ http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
badmash69 16y ago
In my experience , there are two kinds of deployment -- ones without DB changes and ones that are accompanies with DB changes. The deployments that do not require DB changes are easy -- mirror the prod box(non db) onto a smaller box, , deploy upgrades/updates to prod box . If things go wrong, put mirror box online with a DNS/proxy configuration while apologizing to your customer who complain about slower performance . When DB changes are involved , you need to have your DBAs do a dry run of backing out changes-- after all practice makes perfect. Communicate scheduled outage to customers, backup db . Mirror your production box. Roll put update -- if things go wrong, restore DB and bring the mirror box online. I have always focused on DB aspect more -- loss of integrity of data can cause customers to look for your replacement. But I am not sure if weekly upgrades of production environment with paying customers is advisable .
viraptor 16y ago
I can't believe in how misguided this post is... 1. They provide a service to people around the world, yet they don't ensure that someone is available as an emergency contact on Sunday evening, when the first post-deployment usage happens. 2. They don't have a universal list of "this breaks, contact that guy". 3. They don't have a known instant rollback procedure for a release. 4. They don't have cross-component integration tests and they don't do them manually either. 5. They decide that since they can't do a release that doesn't break stuff and can't organise themselves to resolve it quickly during the weekend when it affects only a small number of people, they'll do releases in the middle of the day now, so that they hear customers complaining right away. Is that for real? Is he serious? Here's what I would get out of that issue (even if it's basically reiterating the "wrong" things above): They need to do more integration testing before a release. They need to know who to contact and have to make sure the person is on call and ready for action. The person handling the issue needs to have a simple, quick way to reverse the release without manual intervention (tweaking the code). Again, this specific issue should get regression tests right away. And the most important thing - NEVER treat your customers as a test suite. Of course I'm aware not everyone can afford operating like that. But at least this could be their goal. "Let's make breakage affect more people, so we know about it earlier and when we're at work" is a really silly conclusion.
- gecko 16y ago
  EDIT: I posted a rundown of our deployment process, including where and how tests happen, and why they failed to catch this bug, at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 . While I'm sure there's a lot of stuff we could improve, the situation's not exactly as you describe. Responding to a few contacts: 1 & 2. We do have a list of "if this breaks, contact this guy." What we don't have (in response to your first point) is a demand that those people be available Sunday night. 3. We have a known rollback procedure. It does not work if we do a irreversible schema change and the problem's not caught until 20 hours later. We couldn't just throw out 20 hours of data. 4. We actually do a lot of testing. Beginning on Wednesday, we deploy to our early leak accounts. We steadily increase that through the week. The problem with this particular bug is that you could use Kiln lightly (most of our test accounts are not large accounts) without hitting this problem at all. Even the full QA test suite did not trigger the problem. That happened because Kiln was designed to keep working in the case of a FogBugz communication failure until it couldn't, which was directly proportional to how much you used Kiln. The real problem here, which has been fixed, is that Kiln should not attempt to hide a problem communicating with FogBugz. 5. We don't do release in the middle of the day. We do them at 10 PM. I have no idea where you got that. There's a lot we can improve. We need to make sure Kiln not talking to FogBugz, which can bring down Kiln, hard-fails, instead of trying to continue. We need to make sure that all hands are on-deck when people are going to work, as you noted, which is vastly easier to do midweek than Sunday night. And we probably ought to add more automated testing to the integration points. But I think you're painting a somewhat unfair picture of the current situation.
powdahound 16y ago
We use PagerDuty (http://pagerduty.com http://pagerduty.com) at HipChat and while I absolutely loathe being woken up by it, it's helped us identify issues during off-peak hours much more quickly. But no matter what systems you have in place or how many hundreds of deploys you've done, there's always a new way for things to break.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  I am guessing that HipChat is a startup? Because as an employee any pager I had would be left at work.
krobertson 16y ago
Their problem isn't their deployment process, its their monitoring. Blindly ignoring errors is a recipe for failure. You should always look at situation like that asking "how can we monitor this weak point?" Logging plus a service like Splunk work great. Should always have a solid on call rotation. We have two rotations, and ops one which is first line, and dev in case deeper code changes or more eyes on it are needed.
agentultra 16y ago
Amen. I've tried convincing many companies I've worked for that weekend deployments are a bad idea over the years. Even with continuous integration tests, rolling deployments, and all the precautions in the world things can still happen. You need live people available to handle a deployment. Personally, I don't like working on weekends. I've worked for companies that refused to believe that this was a bad idea. I learned pretty fast that life is too short to work on a weekend. If something does go wrong, it's better to have people on hand to correct the error and get back on track. It's much easier to schedule those people during the work week. It's not rocket science.
ww520 16y ago
Deploying in weekend or at night is a terrible idea in disguise of a good idea. What we used to do are: - No deployment on Weekend - No deployment on Friday - No deployment after 4pm on Monday to Thursday - Deployment is rolled out in stage: one server, 5%, 10%, 50%, 100% of servers. - Rollback steps must be accompanied with deployment steps. - Verification steps must be specified in the deployment ticket. Verification is done by QA or OPS, other than Dev. - Common deployment and rollback steps are automated. - Emergency deployment is an exception to the above but must take extra precaution to babysit the deployment process. Stress level has gone down a lot and problems are resolved much faster once we have the above.
zeruch 16y ago
Users seem more comfortable with predictable maintenance than arbitrary outages. Weekend deploys are just bad all around. When I began in my current role (managing QA/DBAs and app deploys) one of the first things I killed was the late Friday/weekend deploys. They are spirit-crushing and if they go south, they usually go south in a terminal-velocity nose dive. We set up early Fridays for maintenance, to give us enough time in case something goes south. Aggressive Change Control Requests means the people impacted get a heads up (including Account Managers, who in turn inform clients) if there are any user-facing impacts, and we avoid trying to pack too much in at once. Having QA, Engineering and the SOC team on hand is...helpful. Maybe its paranoid, but its been very solid so far. When things have gone south, I think the events -since everyone is "on deck" have actually helped build some cameraderie in the teams themselves.
- vacri 16y ago
  I seem to accrete job roles, and one time I was so far behind on my testing that I went to the boss to ask for a Wed-Sunday work week so I could get some actual work done without interruptions. The first fortnight was great, got through a lot of backlog on sat/sun. The second fortnight sucked as I was blocked on stupidly trivial issues. That ended the experiment. I guess the moral of the story is to pick and choose your 'out of hours' work wisely.

93 points by rockhymas 16y ago

I work for web dev agencies and it surprises me just how often they launch on a Friday afternoon despite how every single developer pleads with them that its an absolutely awful idea. Golden rule, Never launch on a Friday. Personally i've found it easy to persuade clients to do this once you say it'll cost an extra ten grand just for the privilege of a friday launch.

andrewvc 16y ago

I agree that weekend deploys are a shitty idea, but isn't the real issue here not being able to roll back?

gecko 16y ago
Probably? I'm welcome to be schooled here. 90% of the time, we can roll back instantly, because there were no database changes. 5% of the time, we can roll back with slightly more pain, because the database migrations were reversible. In this case, the database migration was not reversible. If we'd noticed immediately, we could still have just activated snapshots, but we didn't notice until 20 hours later. What do others do in this situation?
- peterwwillis 16y ago
  Wait. What blew up that it took someone 20 hours to realize? The first thing you take from that is, don't do anything without double-checking your change to make sure it worked. In terms of rollback, just don't do anything which isn't reversible. Taking chances with your changes is taking chances with your business. If you don't know how to rollback whatever you're doing, ask someone who does (there is always a way to roll back or add redundancy).
  - tedunangst 16y ago
    "The failed API call turns out to be one that’s trivially cached for a very long time, and so is one that Kiln would allow to fail without actually dying."

patio11 16y ago

I feel for you. On the plus side, process improvements to prevent it from happening next time are exactly how you should respond to things like this. One which has saved my bacon numerous times is investing a few hours into tweaking monitoring and alert systems. I hear PagerDuty exists to help with this. I use a bunch of scripts and bubblegum, and even that caught 10 of the last 12 big problems. Queuing systems dying has hosed me many times over the years, for example, and a borked deploy which causes that would have my phone ringing before I got my laptop closed.

mgrouchy 16y ago

I'm lucky to run a system that is small enough that an entire deploy consists of around 2 seconds of downtime for the server to restart and start the new instance of the application. We deploy new versions side by side and then then the webserver points at the new application on restart. Only time it takes any longer is when there are sweeping database changes(schedule the downtime, inspect snapshots incase of issues, etc.)

adamzochowski 16y ago

I was taught that Thursdays are best for deployment because you got Friday to fix stupid things, and then weekend to fix the terrible things. By Monday all is working anyways. And best of all, Friday people are generally happy (it is last day of the week), respectively on Monday expect grumpy users.

_pius 16y ago
Isn't that a Monday launch? :)
nollidge 16y ago
> Friday people are generally happy Not if they're trying to get that last thing done before they can go home. :)

Hominem 16y ago

Oh god. I release 5pm pacific every week because users "can't have a single second" of downtime. We manually test an ever growling checklist fo functionality. There is always, always an issue. The angry emails start to roll in around 5:15 pacific.

swombat 16y ago

Wait, what? You have large numbers of paying customers to whom you're delivering a mission-critical system (source control isn't exactly optional), and your releases involve neither automated production monitoring/continuous deployment nor formal release procedures? I think your problem is more than just weekend deployments! My full comments here: http://swombat.com/2011/3/8/fog-creek-dont-do-cowboy-deployments http://swombat.com/2011/3/8/fog-creek-dont-do-cowboy-deploym...

sghael 16y ago
I agree. My other thought was 'isn't there a staging server in there somewhere?' Something that is near identical to production, with fake production data, etc, that could surface the problem before a customer sees it. btw, props to Fog Creek and OP for airing their dirty laundry. They take some heat, but in the end we all learn from it.
- gecko 16y ago
  We have more than staging servers: we have staging accounts. I documented our full release process at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680.
dpritchett 16y ago
Maybe in the future we can all be IMVU: Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/ http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...

badmash69 16y ago

In my experience , there are two kinds of deployment -- ones without DB changes and ones that are accompanies with DB changes. The deployments that do not require DB changes are easy -- mirror the prod box(non db) onto a smaller box, , deploy upgrades/updates to prod box . If things go wrong, put mirror box online with a DNS/proxy configuration while apologizing to your customer who complain about slower performance . When DB changes are involved , you need to have your DBAs do a dry run of backing out changes-- after all practice makes perfect. Communicate scheduled outage to customers, backup db . Mirror your production box. Roll put update -- if things go wrong, restore DB and bring the mirror box online. I have always focused on DB aspect more -- loss of integrity of data can cause customers to look for your replacement. But I am not sure if weekly upgrades of production environment with paying customers is advisable .

viraptor 16y ago

I can't believe in how misguided this post is... 1. They provide a service to people around the world, yet they don't ensure that someone is available as an emergency contact on Sunday evening, when the first post-deployment usage happens. 2. They don't have a universal list of "this breaks, contact that guy". 3. They don't have a known instant rollback procedure for a release. 4. They don't have cross-component integration tests and they don't do them manually either. 5. They decide that since they can't do a release that doesn't break stuff and can't organise themselves to resolve it quickly during the weekend when it affects only a small number of people, they'll do releases in the middle of the day now, so that they hear customers complaining right away. Is that for real? Is he serious? Here's what I would get out of that issue (even if it's basically reiterating the "wrong" things above): They need to do more integration testing before a release. They need to know who to contact and have to make sure the person is on call and ready for action. The person handling the issue needs to have a simple, quick way to reverse the release without manual intervention (tweaking the code). Again, this specific issue should get regression tests right away. And the most important thing - NEVER treat your customers as a test suite. Of course I'm aware not everyone can afford operating like that. But at least this could be their goal. "Let's make breakage affect more people, so we know about it earlier and when we're at work" is a really silly conclusion.

gecko 16y ago
EDIT: I posted a rundown of our deployment process, including where and how tests happen, and why they failed to catch this bug, at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 . While I'm sure there's a lot of stuff we could improve, the situation's not exactly as you describe. Responding to a few contacts: 1 & 2. We do have a list of "if this breaks, contact this guy." What we don't have (in response to your first point) is a demand that those people be available Sunday night. 3. We have a known rollback procedure. It does not work if we do a irreversible schema change and the problem's not caught until 20 hours later. We couldn't just throw out 20 hours of data. 4. We actually do a lot of testing. Beginning on Wednesday, we deploy to our early leak accounts. We steadily increase that through the week. The problem with this particular bug is that you could use Kiln lightly (most of our test accounts are not large accounts) without hitting this problem at all. Even the full QA test suite did not trigger the problem. That happened because Kiln was designed to keep working in the case of a FogBugz communication failure until it couldn't, which was directly proportional to how much you used Kiln. The real problem here, which has been fixed, is that Kiln should not attempt to hide a problem communicating with FogBugz. 5. We don't do release in the middle of the day. We do them at 10 PM. I have no idea where you got that. There's a lot we can improve. We need to make sure Kiln not talking to FogBugz, which can bring down Kiln, hard-fails, instead of trying to continue. We need to make sure that all hands are on-deck when people are going to work, as you noted, which is vastly easier to do midweek than Sunday night. And we probably ought to add more automated testing to the integration points. But I think you're painting a somewhat unfair picture of the current situation.

powdahound 16y ago

We use PagerDuty (http://pagerduty.com http://pagerduty.com) at HipChat and while I absolutely loathe being woken up by it, it's helped us identify issues during off-peak hours much more quickly. But no matter what systems you have in place or how many hundreds of deploys you've done, there's always a new way for things to break.

tomjen3 16y ago
I am guessing that HipChat is a startup? Because as an employee any pager I had would be left at work.

krobertson 16y ago

Their problem isn't their deployment process, its their monitoring. Blindly ignoring errors is a recipe for failure. You should always look at situation like that asking "how can we monitor this weak point?" Logging plus a service like Splunk work great. Should always have a solid on call rotation. We have two rotations, and ops one which is first line, and dev in case deeper code changes or more eyes on it are needed.

agentultra 16y ago

Amen. I've tried convincing many companies I've worked for that weekend deployments are a bad idea over the years. Even with continuous integration tests, rolling deployments, and all the precautions in the world things can still happen. You need live people available to handle a deployment. Personally, I don't like working on weekends. I've worked for companies that refused to believe that this was a bad idea. I learned pretty fast that life is too short to work on a weekend. If something does go wrong, it's better to have people on hand to correct the error and get back on track. It's much easier to schedule those people during the work week. It's not rocket science.

ww520 16y ago

Deploying in weekend or at night is a terrible idea in disguise of a good idea. What we used to do are: - No deployment on Weekend - No deployment on Friday - No deployment after 4pm on Monday to Thursday - Deployment is rolled out in stage: one server, 5%, 10%, 50%, 100% of servers. - Rollback steps must be accompanied with deployment steps. - Verification steps must be specified in the deployment ticket. Verification is done by QA or OPS, other than Dev. - Common deployment and rollback steps are automated. - Emergency deployment is an exception to the above but must take extra precaution to babysit the deployment process. Stress level has gone down a lot and problems are resolved much faster once we have the above.

zeruch 16y ago

Users seem more comfortable with predictable maintenance than arbitrary outages. Weekend deploys are just bad all around. When I began in my current role (managing QA/DBAs and app deploys) one of the first things I killed was the late Friday/weekend deploys. They are spirit-crushing and if they go south, they usually go south in a terminal-velocity nose dive. We set up early Fridays for maintenance, to give us enough time in case something goes south. Aggressive Change Control Requests means the people impacted get a heads up (including Account Managers, who in turn inform clients) if there are any user-facing impacts, and we avoid trying to pack too much in at once. Having QA, Engineering and the SOC team on hand is...helpful. Maybe its paranoid, but its been very solid so far. When things have gone south, I think the events -since everyone is "on deck" have actually helped build some cameraderie in the teams themselves.

vacri 16y ago
I seem to accrete job roles, and one time I was so far behind on my testing that I went to the boss to ask for a Wed-Sunday work week so I could get some actual work done without interruptions. The first fortnight was great, got through a lot of backlog on sat/sun. The second fortnight sucked as I was blocked on stupidly trivial issues. That ended the experiment. I guess the moral of the story is to pick and choose your 'out of hours' work wisely.