Deployment: May 16, 2008

This was a simple “bug fix” or “service pack” deployment, to fix some of the issues discovered during the last deployment. Because there was no DBR this time, we expected the deployment to be quicker than usual, and because there was no new functionality, just bug fixes, we also expected the Landing Tests to be quicker than usual.

Quite a number of steps in this deployment are overlapped with each other. We were doing a lot of things at once, and we had to get some log files while we did the deployment, to troubleshoot some issues that we’d been having. This was nothing to do with the deployment itself, but we wanted to do it while we were there. (There were a lot of log files, so this step is overlapped with much of the rest of the deployment; the log files were gzipped and tarred while everything else was going on.)

01:30–01:33 (3 minutes): We all logged onto the conference bridge, and confirmed that we were ready to go.

01:33–01:34 (1 minute): We performed a minor configuration change, to turn off the redirection functionality. (See the last deployment for information on that.)

01:34–02:40 (1 hour and 6 minutes): We gathered the log files from the production servers.

01:42–01:52 (10 minutes): We redeployed the old version of the application.

01:52–02:05 (13 minutes): We did our Sanity Testing of the old version of the application.

01:52–02:40 (48 minutes): We adjusted the logging level on the new version of the application. (This wouldn’t normally take this long—it’s a simple configuration change—but again, the person making the change was also busy tarring and gzipping the old log files at the same time. Also, we had to have some discussions about what settings to use.)

02:10–02:15 (5 minutes): The users did their Landing Testing for the old application. (Everything was successful.)

01:52–02:45 (53 minutes): We redeployed the new version of the application. (Again, this took longer than normal because of the overlapping steps above—mostly the gathering of the log files.)

02:45–03:07 (22 minutes): We did our Sanity Testing of the new version of the application.

03:07–03:21 (14 minutes): The users did their Landing Testing for the new version of the application. (Everything was successful.)