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Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

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Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#11

Throwaway for obvious reason. But… 1-2 days. Multiple senior engineers cherry picking commits into a release branch with even more seniors doing atteststion. It’s a company-wide effort that happens every sprint. We have “staff” SREs who can’t figure out automated releases.

Oh...wow. Thank you for sharing, that does not sound like fun.

Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#13
Maybe an hour...if you get it right the first time. There's nothing especially odd about the architecture of our app, but the person who used to have my job was the president of the Not Invented Here Syndrome Fan Club, and our deployment consists of a set of handrolled Python scripts and some partial documentation on how to use them. This is one reason, and far from the biggest, that his old job is no longer his.

The good news is, we have an engineer putting in about 70% of his time on converting this to Terraform, and every time I do a deployment, it gets a little quicker and easier.

Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#15
Depends if there's a database migration or not.

If no database migration, than maybe a minute or two (via GitHub actions).

If there is a database migration it might take a while depending on how much data needs to get moved around.

Adding columns usually takes no time. Adding indexes to a big table takes a few hours.

Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#16
post #15

Depends if there's a database migration or not. If no database migration, than maybe a minute or two (via GitHub actions). If there is a database migration it might take a while depending on how much data needs to get moved around. Adding columns usually takes no time. Adding indexes to a big table takes a few hours.

Oh, and if prisma fucks up it takes hours...but that doesn't happen since we just started pushing the prisma schema directly.

Their rebuild-from-clean documentation worked in 2 out of 3 environments...unfortunately production was the one that it didn't work in. At this point we're like fuck it.

At least it's not Hibernate(tm).

Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#17

Throwaway for obvious reason. But… 1-2 days. Multiple senior engineers cherry picking commits into a release branch with even more seniors doing atteststion. It’s a company-wide effort that happens every sprint. We have “staff” SREs who can’t figure out automated releases.

:( this makes me sad

Re: Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company

#20
It would be good to distinguish build-and-deploy which Vercel does by default to other pipelines where you might build the artefacts, test them, then the deploy is more of a copying of those artefacts into production. In the latter case the “deploy” would be faster.
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