Is there a finishing line in deployment? vpTech explains why it is a long race to run together.

Marathon runners make the finishing line look easy, effortless and inspiring. However, what exactly does it take to run a marathon and how do you make sure you stack up all the necessary practices to make it on the race day?

Real marathon training is about having a few hundred miles under your belt but it becomes real only when you cross the finishing line on the race day. Just like marathon running, deployment is a lengthy process where anything is theory unless it has been tested and gone to production.

It explains why vpTech adopts the ‘marathon’ attitude to run the IT processes of Veepee.

Deployment is an ongoing process which requires a lot of preparations, adjustments, and very often there is a need to re-think and re-do practices already in place. When the vpTech community started the deployment for Veepee, it took several days to go to production by that time. Now, hundreds of productions are launched every day! But just like Rome, the process wasn’t built overnight.

Here is what vpTech did to optimize deployment to production by improving the processes on all the levels.

From code to communication.

With the “marathon” spirit and a “relay race” state of mind, vpTech puts in place a chain of practices to make the rest of the workflow efficient and smooth. In the first place, comfort and communication have been their main priorities. Indeed, they have mainly focused on:

1. Automatization. Current engineering tools automatically execute green and blue deployment to try them via canary deployment. If it is validated, it goes directly to production, without previous manual validations. If the team wants to change a form on the website, or introduce a new A/B test, they simply release code.
2. Open-source solutions. When you have too many production solutions developed, it can become problematic because if you change teams even within the company, you would have to re-learn the work process.
   Today this challenge has been solved with a perfectly working open-source solution which the vpTech team has improved by themselves. By making it autonomous and collaborative at the same time, the work of the dev teams has become more effective.

Today, thanks to those first improvements, what used to be 4-day deployment with manual validations has turned into 1-minute deployment without any human validation.

But the optimization of our deployment processes doesn’t stop here.

The team adjusts the existing practices, rethinks the old ones, gets rid of the irrelevant ones and introduces new ideas. The goal of the “marathon, not the sprint” attitude is to build up stamina, identify the best-working processes, and then iterate (or taper), when needed. At vpTech we also add the attitude of a relay race — the marathon we run together, where the goal is to gather the strongest skills and collaborate towards a smoother workflow.

Repetition, preparation and advance are what makes the finishing line closer. Is there such a thing as a finishing line in deployment? At vpTech we apply our acquired knowledge and practice to the upcoming challenges, building up our future growth on our experience.