No Way Out But Through

• “I believe deploys should be routine, cheap, and safe”
• Routine
  • “In deployment, the path of least resistance should also be the right way to do it. It should be easier and quicker to deploy the right way than to circumvent the process. Making “proper” deploys more complex, slower, or riddled with manual steps backfires. Human nature will lead to chaotic evil, like hand-edited files on production machines.”
• Cheap
  • “Rare, expensive deploys bundle many changes; quick, cheap deploys can bundle just a few. This becomes important when things don’t go as planned. The most plausible answer to “what went wrong” is usually “the last thing we changed.” So when debugging a problem in production, it matters a great deal whether the release diff is a handful of lines or thousands.”
  • “Infrequent deploys also create natural deadlines. Engineers will tend to rush to get their changes in for a weekly push, and rushing leads to mistakes. If pushes happen hourly, the penalty for waiting for the next one to write a few more unit tests is much less severe.”
• Safe