Make It Small

“Make it large” is the mantra these days, but when it comes to releasing software, think the opposite, make it small. The secret to a successful release is to break it into numerous small deployments; this serves a dual purpose, minimizes risk as well as gives you enough leeway to fix bugs before it negatively impacts end users.

Never wait for a feature to be complete for deployment. Break it into multiple smaller chunks and keep deploying these to production even though no one will be using it. Smaller deployments always win over one big bang deployment. Longer the code runs in production, more data points you have to analyze and take corrective steps.

If you can test with real users without them knowing, there is nothing like it. If you put your mind to it, you will always figure out a way to do this. Taking an example, let us say you are building a chat feature for your application. You can stealthily release it without informing your users and send dummy messages on their behalf. The user does not see any chat related functionalities, but behind the scene, you create dummy messages and send them to one another. Apparently, this is how Facebook tested their chat before launch; this allows you to check your feature realistically in ways it will be ultimately used.

Another trick is to log the action without actually carrying out the intended side effect. Say for example; you are introducing an API rate limiter. As a first step, start logging whenever an API call hits the rate limit threshold. During this phase do not block the calls, the idea is to emulate the result; this lets you test out the feature with real traffic and fix any bugs before it starts negatively affecting your API consumers. Once you are confident of your approach, you can roll out the feature where you block offending callers.

Phased rollouts is a life saver. Release features to a small set of users, keenly observe your application and gradually ramp up to 100%; this minimizes the impact of bugs and lets you catch them early.

Another lifesaver is feature flags. The idea behind a feature flag is simple; you put all your features behind an on-off flag which you can toggle if and when needed. The ability to turn off features during their early lives gives you a lot of flexibility and room to maneuver and improvise.

If you are working on refactoring or replacing an infrastructure component, never do a stop the world cut off. Always run both the systems in parallel and only once you are confident of the new approach, do the switch over. Say, for example, you are moving your data source from MySQL to Mongo, start by writing to both the datastores in parallel. Then change your application to work with Mongo while still keeping the option to fall back to MySQL if needed. Put this behind a flag which you can toggle. Only once you are confident of everything working with Mongo, pull the plug on MySQL.

The common thread that holds all these strategies together is to plan your deployments such that they are small and gradual; if something goes wrong, it is not catastrophic. You increase the scope gradually as you observe and gain confidence.

As they say – Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything. A bit of planning goes a long way in reducing risk as well as giving an excellent experience to your users.

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels