Design and Build Great Web APIs

The Basics of Deployment Pipelines

One of the most challenging elements to designing and building APIs is the act of deploying the completed work into production. In many organizations, this “release into production” step is so fraught with danger that they have a special set of rituals established to deal with it.

Here are some of the rituals I’ve heard about when talking to companies about their release or deployment processes:

• “We can only release on the weekend, when no one’s in the building.”

• “Before release, we have a meeting with all the department heads at which everyone has to give their ‘go/no-go’ to proceed.”

• “We stop all coding and bug fixes for two weeks while we package up and validate the build for the upcoming release.”

• “Production ...