Deployment: May 5, 2008

May is going to be a rough month—I’m doing deployments three out of four weekends this month. This one was sort of a preparatory deployment; the real functionality would be put into production the next week, but this one was getting ready for it.

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 shut down the application servers.

01:34: We decided that we didn’t need to back up the database, before executing the database scripts, since a back-out of the deployment wouldn’t require backing out the database changes. (The scripts were only creating new objects, that could sit in the database unused in the event of a back-out, no modifications to existing objects were being made.)

01:34–01:38 (4 minutes): We executed the database scripts.

01:35–01:40 (5 minutes): I verified the output logs from the DB scripts, to verify that everything ran successfully.

01:40–01:43 (3 minutes): We restarted the application servers, and deployed one of the two applications we needed to deploy.

01:43–01:44 (1 minute): We deployed the other application.

01:44–02:26 (42 minutes): We did our Sanity Testing. We actually could have finished our Sanity Testing much earlier, but all of the people who needed to do Landing Tests were in their cars on their way to the office, and not ready to do their tests yet, so we just kept testing, until they got in.

02:15–02:36 (21 minutes): We did our Landing Tests. (This actually overlapped with the Sanity Test; the main users who we needed didn’t get into the office until after others did. So we did some Landing Tests, but the really important tests didn’t happen until later in this block of time.) Everything tested fine, which made the deployment a success.

In the end, it actually turned out to be a good thing that the important testing was delayed. It allowed us to get some of the minor testing—which would have been the bulk of time spent—out of the way, and we didn’t have to waste extra time at the end of the deployment.