Software people, how do you do releases? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by treechicken@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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My team has this one shared component that gets involved in like every feature's development. This year, we're loading like 5 different features onto it, all with different timelines, and my head's about to explode trying to figure out how to make it all fly.

How does everyone else do their software releases? Do you freeze prod and then do one big release later? Throw everything into prod during dev, hope no one sees the unreleased stuff, and just announce it later? Or something else entirely?

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[-] OneCardboardBox 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Small releases, on a regular cadence.

How do you ensure that you're not releasing features before they're ready? Kinda depends on the application, but you might use feature flags. A system for turning features on and off without deploying the application. It could be a Boolean in a redis cache that your app looks for, or a DB entry, or another API. The point is for you to be able to flick a switch to turn it on instantly, and then if if breaks things in prod you can just as easily turn it off again.

And just a word of advice: Consider the performance impact of your feature flag's implementation. We had a team tank their service's performance because it was checking hundreds of feature flags in different DBs on every API call. Some kind of in-app caching layer with a short refresh period might help.

this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024

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