From the new additions to the changes that are implemented on the website, the most crucial part is the deployment and release of those changes. There are important decisions that can weigh down a pivotal impact on the end-user of the application. Given the importance, we are going to talk about those deployment and release strategies today!

2. ● Introduction
● Meaning and Difference
● Advantages of Deploy and Release
Separation
● Common Deployment Strategies
● Deployment Best Practices
● Which deployment strategy is best?
● Types of Release Methods
Index

3. Software application development is an arduous process.
When a website is built from scratch or is revamped after a long time,
a process of strategies is put into play.
From the new additions to the changes that are implemented on the
website, the most crucial part is the deployment and release of those
changes.
There are important decisions that can weigh down a pivotal impact
on the end-user of the application. Given the importance, we are
going to talk about those deployment and release strategies today!
Introduction

4. Meaning & Difference
Deploy
The process of getting software applications run smoothly in a given
environment is termed as the act of deployment. Without involving the
release, deployment includes installation, configuration, testing, and
making necessary changes of features in a specified environment.
Release
When the software is ready to be pushed to production it is called
release. The process entails making the software open to the users or a
subset of users, like only 5% of the user base.

5. Source: ManageEngine

6. Advantages of Deploy and
Release Separation
With the minimal differences in the approach, it might sound difficult
to separate the two. But the ideal scenario is to keep them isolated for
minimizing the technical risk of changes in code.
● It also allows for faster feedback from the user pool.
● There are many release strategies that aid the separation of
deploys and releases that help development teams to release
more frequently.

7. Common Deployment Strategies
No Deployment Strategy
A cheap but dangerous method, the No deployment strategy is simply
nothing but skipping a few steps. If your site is getting traffic then live
site production changes might hamper your traffic. On the other hand,
the process of coding involves a lot of to and fro of breaking and fixing
the site.
Copy the New Site into Production
When we switched from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, the strategy to copy the
entire new site to the production server was an apt one. However, the
process of copying the site to production is a risky one. If you are making
minor changes like theme refreshes or daily maintenance, there are
chances that you might lose your data and leads.

8. Compile First, Deploy Later
There are various third-party vendors who offer static site generators for a
simplified process of building an offline site securely. This strategy helps
your site from being attacked by the internet due to the bugs. Once the
static site is compiled properly you can copy the resulting code to the
web host for live production.
Blue/Green Deployment
The most essential strategy that minimizes the maintenance gap and
provides a solid roll-back for the changes is, Blue/Green. It creates two
different production environments marked as ‘Blue’ which is in standby
and ‘Green’ which is Live.
All the changes are deployed to the offline environment and are
promoted to the live one. This gives you the advantage to switch between
the two as per the requirements and the maintenance cycle of the site.

9. Dev/Stage/Production pipeline
As a standard process of deployment, this strategy involves three copies
of the site:
● Dev Copy- where the development work takes place
● Stage/Test Copy- To test the deployment process before rolling out
to production
● Live Copy: The production to live for the public
This pipeline is often adopted by e-commerce businesses for the ease
and management of collected data like forms, comments, reviews, and
other related details.

10. Deployment Best Practices
● Make a checklist/pipeline of things to do before and after deployment
to ensure the safety of data
● The process of continuous integration can be adopted to ensure that
every change is tested before its sent for deployment and there are no
errors along the path.
● Similarly, adopt Continuous Delivery (CD).
● You can invest in standard operating environments (SOEs) that help
ensure the consistency in the environment
● Automate the build with tools that can simplify the process of tearing
down an entire infrastructure stack and rebuild it from scratch.
● Have a systematic process for creating alerts that can warn teams
about the changes or notify about the issues in real-time.

11. Which Deployment Strategy is
best?
No one strategy can be termed as best for all the outlines that
can occur in the deployment cycles. A strategy is best when it
fits the best in that given situation and works out well for the
production server.
A site can be deployment and released using various
approaches from taking the entire site together or breaking it
into pieces. Which one will feel more comfortable and will
simplify your tasks is subjective to the developer.

12. Types of Release Methods

13. Environment Based Releases
It is the Canary release that involves releasing the new code to a limited section
of users and only later releasing it to the rest of the user base. This empowers
you with the ability to test software change with real users and gives valuable
stats in terms of inputs for the complete release of those changes. The
automation rollback is an added advantage of the Canary releases when the
changes fail to meet the technical or user metrics. As each change is
monitored, the performance is measured using metrics pertaining to the
response of the users.
Application Based Releases
Application-based releases use feature toggles as a popular way of
implementation. It controls the application code to allow progressive exposure
of new features to users. It enables features for certain users and development
teams to deploy them to production without actually releasing any changes.
Feature toggles aid continuous deployment and is used to disable
non-essential features during times of high load, or while a feature is failing.

14. Conclusion
Every version of change and new features are different. They
require a unique system to handle and execute in the process
of software application development. While the recreate
strategy might be best for one, the canary deployment can be
a good choice for another. Therefore, it is wise to weigh the
situation of your application and accordingly take a decision.

15. Talk to Drupal experts, ping us at
hello@opensenselabs.com to get the best of
Drupal and augmented reality for your future
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