Holding Deploys
Today I’m happy to announce a new pro feature on Skyliner: deploy holds. Using this feature you can indicate to your teammates that deploys should be paused, giving a reason for the disruption.
The most common use case for this is when’s something’s wrong. Suppose some alerts have just gone off, and you need to investigate. This is more easily and safely done if the application isn’t being changed by others while you work.
This quick video demonstrates setting a deploy hold and then releasing it:
A Lightweight Feature
We think that you should feel free to hold your deploy queue whenever you’re not confident that all is well. To that end, we’ve intentionally designed deploy holds to be simple and unobtrusive.
- Anyone can hold the deploy queue. Since anyone can notice a problem with your site or service, we think that anyone should be able to sound the alarm.
- You can still deploy while the queue is on hold. Fixing production issues often involves pushing a fix, so we never actually prevent deploys. We simply warn that deploys are on hold, and to proceed with caution.
- Anyone can release the deploy queue. If one of your colleagues sets a deploy hold and then walks out for coffee, you aren’t at their mercy.
Seamlessly integrated into the Skyliner workflow
Since holding deploys is meant to signal a problem, your team will get Slack notifications when holds are set and released. And if your application is configured to automatically deploy, any scheduled deployments will be prevented when deploys are on hold.
Skyliner is designed with the premise that deploying and operating a web service is a team activity. Our intention is to provide you with a toolkit for collaboration, not just a set of solitary scripts.
If you haven’t tried Skyliner yet, you can sign up for free today! It’s free for personal use and reasonably priced for teams.
