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Deployment Scaling

Deployment can sometimes be neither a big-bang delivery of changes nor be full of multiple manual steps. A phased process is needed.

Clarive supports different ways of scaling deployments.

  • Partial deployments.
  • Rolling and phased.
  • Canary and hot, blue, green and dark launch modes.

Blue-Green Deployment

Blue-green deployment scaling strategy is a type of active-passive target deployment in which one node (passive) is being deployed, while the other, active node, is live.

To implement blue-green deployments, use either of the following methods:

  • Paused deployment (preferred).
  • Blue-green Environments.

Combined with a set of rule ops that change the active and passive node roles (i.e. by stopping and starting processes in each server or cluster).

Paused Deployment

Using a Pause op in the rule will stop deployment after the passive node has been deployed to. After verifying the node, the rule op will switch passive-active nodes and continue deploying.

Blue-Green Environments

One environment is Blue and another is Green, such as a PROD-GREEN and PROD-BLUE environments.

Environments can inherit from a parent environment, therefore the only difference between them should be the target servers to which deployment is performed.

This method permits a longer phased release to run in two different Jobs.

Dark Launch and Feature Toggles

Dark launching and feature toggle is a scaled deployment strategy that involves setting up an application specific switch that can activate a feature only to a certain group of users, geographies, etc.

Although Clarive is not actually part of a feature toggle mechanism, since it should be an internal application, there are several Clarive features that externally support implementing dark launch in an application:

  • Variable parsing in config files.
  • Conditional building and conditional deployment.

An external dark launch strategy means that it is Clarive that takes care of turning the feature switch on/off in your application for a certain environment or conditional variable in the build or deployment process.

Variable Parsing for Dark Launching

Set up a config file with optional values, then use a deployment rule logic that activates the feature:

FOREACH deployment_node
    DEPLOY artifact
    IF node = activated_feature
       THEN SET feature_toggle = ON
       PARSE config file
       DEPLOY config to node
       ELSE DEPLOY config to node

Here are the config file contents prior to Clarive parsing the variables:

show_feature = ${feature_toggle}

Conditional Build and Deploy

Dark launches can be also controlled by conditional build options in the pipeline rules. That way, rules will build or deploy the feature according to the target.

IF node = active_feature
   THEN DEPLOY artifact_v1
ELSE
   DEPLOY artifact_v2

Canary

Canary deployments are a scaled and tested deployment strategy.

The recommended way is to configure a Canary environment and statuses to which to deploy:

  • Create environments PROD-CANARY and PROD, then deploy to PROD-CANARY first.
  • After deployment, trigger tests.
  • Move release to failed environment.

Hot Deployment

Clarive supports hot-deploying to servers. Hot-deploying means that the application will not have any disruptions before, during or after deploying a new version.

Usually it depends on the technology being targeted by the deploy.

For example, JBoss, WebSpehere® and Weblogic® application servers all support a hot deploy mode.