Continuous deployment in Launchpad

It currently takes an average of two weeks for new changes that have been developed for Launchpad to become live on the Launchpad site.

We’re working on changing this and making the way we deploy Launchpad simpler and more reliable at the same time.

In the first generation of this, we are targeting changes that do not alter the data model, and we’re aiming for a delay of 12-16 hours. Longer term we’ll be aiming for a few hours.

If you are a ‘beta‘ user of Launchpad, this has one primary, and very important change: the ‘edge’ site is going to be removed. We now have a process for validating changes that would previously have been validated on edge using a new staging site. The edge site previously received unvalidated updates and would from time to time have issues as a result. If you are not a ‘beta’ user, then nothing should change for you at all, except that you will notice site changes more often, with no downtime, rather than once a month after downtime.

Sometime in the next few weeks the redirect to ‘edge’ will be removed (it only affected beta users). Instead of a redirect to ‘edge’, the main website will offer you any unreleased functionality, and the ‘disable edge redirect’ link will turn off that functionality for a moderate time period. Following that we will put in place a redirect from ‘edge’ to the normal ‘launchpad.net’ across all of the ‘edge’ servers, and move the servers to the main site server farm.

3 Responses to “Continuous deployment in Launchpad”

  1. Martin Pool Says:

    … and this is now getting closer: edge rollouts are no longer happening automatically, though the domain still exists.

  2. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] previously posted about our continuous deployment efforts in Launchpad. Since then the project has come a long way. We can deploy to nearly all our […]

  3. Launchpad.net: bug 1 000 000 | jonathan carter Says:

    […] First off, congratulations to the Launchpad.net team for reaching bug #1000000. They’ve managed to build a huge platform that scales very well. Very few bug trackers live to that milestone and it’s amazing how they have managed to keep it snappy and also keep downtime so low by doing continuous roll-out. […]

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