Learning Serverless

Chapter 8. Changes, Automation, and Deployment Pipelines

Innovation, increased developer velocity and productivity, rapid technological advancement, and the ever-changing microservice ecosystem can all very quickly be brought to a screeching halt if any piece of the microservice ecosystem becomes unstable or unreliable. In some cases, all it takes to bring the entire business down is deploying a broken build or a build containing a bug to one business-critical microservice.

Susan J. Fowler, Production-Ready Microservices (O’Reilly)

It’s one thing to create a prototype or even an MVP of a software project. It’s an entirely different thing to get that code into production and shepherd it to launch. Or at least it used to be. Launching the code over the wall is no longer in vogue (I blame open office floor plans). It would be nice if we could rely on a magical team of bash-script-incanting wizards to maintain stability and resilience, but in reality this is up to the engineering team, whose previous primary focus may have been simply to develop features.

If that’s you, don’t be embarrassed that your employer now expects an instant fluency in infrastructure and production. This chapter is here to help. By the end, you will be tourist-level proficient at DevOps: you’ll at least be able to ask for directions, understand the maps, and not feel as lost.

I’m going to assume that you are in an organization that provides some access to DevOps resources, even if they are more internal consultants ...