IREX - Deploiement sur Kubernetes

Faced with the constant acceleration of software development cycles, manual deployment management has become a major bottleneck for companies.
Automatic deployment eliminates human errors, accelerates production releases, and ensures process consistency. This article explains the basics of automatic deployment, its different approaches, and provides concrete examples to better understand its utility.

1. what it is?

Automatic deployment is a process that allows applications or systems to be deployed to production in an automated manner, without direct human intervention, through predefined tools and scripts.
This process can involve a web application, database, microservice, or complete infrastructure. It differs from continuous integration (CI) and should not be confused with simple automated compilation.
Automatic deployment verifies whether an application functions correctly in production, identifies potential issues before they affect users, and provides rollback mechanisms in case of problems.




2. Who implements?

You're probably wondering who can or is responsible for implementing automatic deployment?
Well, it's a DevOps expert, also called a DevOps engineer!
To become a DevOps engineer, you need extensive mastery of systems, networks, development, and automation tools, as the DevOps world is cross-functional.

• Here is why

In a constantly evolving development environment, human errors, repetitive manual processes, and frequent updates make automation indispensable. Motivations are often efficiency-related, but can also concern reliability and scalability.
With the continuous increase in feature demands and pressure to reduce time-to-market, it has become essential for any company, regardless of sector, to implement automatic deployments, particularly within continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) frameworks.

There are two main types of automatic deployments, each addressing specific needs to better secure and optimize company production releases.

1. Automatic deployment in staging environment

Automatic staging deployment occurs in a pre-production environment that faithfully reproduces the production environment. This allows testing new features and fixes before actual production deployment.




2. Automatic deployment in production

Automatic production deployment directly deploys changes to the environment accessible to end users. This approach requires complete confidence in automated testing and validation processes.
Well, it's a DevOps expert, also called a DevOps engineer!
To become a DevOps engineer, you need extensive mastery of systems, networks, development, and automation tools, as the DevOps world is cross-functional.

These two approaches are complementary and allow evaluation of real risks to which the application is exposed, both in testing and production phases.

Depending on the chosen deployment approach, a strategy can be classified into several categories.

1. Blue green Deployment

In Blue-Green deployment, two identical environments are maintained: one active (Blue) serving users, the other inactive (Green) for new versions.
The process involves:


• Deploying the new version to the inactive environment
• Performing all necessary tests
• Switching traffic to the new enviroment
• Keeping the old enviroment as backup
This strategy reproduces the conditions of a major update


2. Canary Deployment

In Canary deployment, the new version is first deployed to a small percentage of users or servers.


This approach allows:


• Testing the new version wirh real but limited traffic
• Identifying potential issues before full deployment
• Collecting metrics and user feedback


3. Rolling Deployment

In Rolling deployment, the new version is progressively deployed across all servers, gradually replacing the old version.

This process includes:


• Gradual updating of instances
• Maintaining service availability
• Possibility of rollback in case of problems
• Continuous performance monitoring
The objective is to simulate continuous updates without service interruption

Strategy selection

The choice of deployment strategy is crucial and must correspond to client needs. Depending on the strategy, results vary, so it's essential to identify what the company wants to protect and what level of risk it accepts. Then, you must define the deployment type and necessary tools.

Concrete examples:

1. As a CTO(Chief of Technology Officer)

if you fear an update might break your critical application, prioritize Blue-Green deployment, as this scenario offers the best security with immediate rollback.


2. For a high-traffic application

to evaluate the impact of a new feature, opt for Canary deployment. This allows testing with a limited percentage of users and identifying issues before full deployment.


3. For a microservices application

with required high availability, choose Rolling deployment. This approach maintains service during updates and manages each component independently.

Automatic deployment is an essential tool to help companies accelerate their development cycle while maintaining system quality and reliability. By choosing the appropriate strategy, automatic deployment eliminates human errors and improves overall efficiency. Faced with rising demands for speed and reliability, integrating these processes into development strategy has become indispensable.