Operating Continuously

Chapter 2. Release

Now that we have a firm understanding of deployment strategies, let’s look more closely at the next stage of the improved framework, release (see Figure 2-1). This is perhaps the most exciting and impactful stage because it represents when users, or the people most commonly consuming the software or features being released, are able to see and adopt new functionality within their application. For these same individuals, the deploy and measure stages are (hopefully) invisible. The operate stage focuses on the ongoing “care and feeding” of the application and its underlying platform, including when things go wrong. Release represents the big reveal!

Figure 2-1. The release stage

As discussed in Chapter 1, the modernized framework reverses the position of deploy and release. Deploy is the first step of the ops process, in which code is placed in a software environment. After code has been deployed, the various features enabled within its deployment are ready to be released for consumption.

The release process has undergone a significant shift in orthodoxy in recent years, and not just because it’s the most outwardly visible segment. New tools, ideas, and processes—particularly feature flags and the feature management systems that operate them—have fundamentally transformed the way teams release changes to their applications.

Feature flagging represents a significant ...