Guardrailed Releases: Achieving Progressive Delivery with Governance
Transform your delivery process with feature flags, canaries, and blue/green deployments while minimizing risks.
Progressive delivery without governance is a recipe for chaos.Back to all posts
In today's fast-paced software landscape, a single line of legacy code can bring down your entire payment system during peak shopping hours, costing you not just revenue but also customer trust. Progressive delivery methods like feature flags, canaries, and blue/green deployments can mitigate these risks, but without a
robust governance framework, you risk chaos. Engineering leaders must prioritize minimizing change failure rates and improving lead times to ensure safe and reliable releases.
Governance is not just a buzzword; it's a necessity. As you adopt progressive delivery, you need to establish clear policies that dictate how changes are approved and rolled out. This includes defining who can toggle feature flags, under what circumstances canary releases happen, and how blue/green deployments are to
be managed. Without these guardrails, your teams may inadvertently introduce instability into your systems, jeopardizing both customer experience and operational integrity.
Implementing these strategies requires a systematic approach. Start with defining your feature flag strategy. Decide when to use feature flags and how to manage them. Use tools like LaunchDarkly or FeatureFlag to control your flags efficiently.
Next, set up canary releases. Gradually roll out changes to a small subset of users to monitor performance and catch issues early. Tools like Spinnaker can facilitate this process.
For blue/green deployments, maintain two identical production environments. This allows you to switch traffic seamlessly between them, minimizing downtime and reducing risk. Kubernetes can be instrumental in managing these deployments.
Key takeaways
- Implement governance to minimize risk in progressive delivery.
- Focus on metrics like change failure rate and lead time for success.
- Create repeatable checklists that scale with your team.
Implementation checklist
- Define your feature flag strategy: Decide when and how to use feature flags.
- Set up canary releases: Gradually roll out changes to a small subset of users.
- Implement blue/green deployments: Maintain two identical production environments.
- Establish governance policies: Document who can approve changes and under what conditions.
Questions we hear from teams
- What tools should I use for feature flags?
- Consider using LaunchDarkly or FeatureFlag for managing feature flags effectively.
- How do I measure change failure rate?
- Track the number of failed deployments against the total number of deployments to calculate your change failure rate.
- What is a blue/green deployment?
- A blue/green deployment strategy maintains two identical production environments to minimize downtime during releases.
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