The Basics of Deployment Pipelines

Design and Build Great Web APIs — by Mike Amundsen (82 / 127)

👈 Chapter 11 Deploying APIs | TOC | The Role of DevOps 👉

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 releases take so much time and energy from the team that we only do it a few times a year.”

As you can see from this short list (I have many more in my files), releasing can be tough. There are lots of reasons for this, most of them historical, but it all boils down to some basic issues:

Too much time passes between releases.
Writing code and building software is a pretty detailed and exacting practice. Small changes can have big impacts on the system you’re working on. And as…