Deploys at Slack

#1

Post by michaeldeng18 » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

Re: Deploys at Slack

#2

Post by brycethornton » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

It's always nice to see how other teams do it. Nothing too groundbreaking here but that's a good thing.

I did notice the screenshot of "Checkpoint", their deployment tracking UI. Are there solid open source or SaaS tools doing something similar? I've seen various companies build similar tools but most deployment processes are consistent enough to have a 3rd-party tool that was useful for most teams.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#3

Post by stopachka » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

This is very similar to the process fb had for years. With some caveats (prod deploys once a week, handled by a central team)

I think this kind of process can last a company well into the thousands of engineers.

Great work

Re: Deploys at Slack

#4

Post by MuffinFlavored » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

Do they use Kubernetes at Slack?

Re: Deploys at Slack

#5

Post by walrus01 » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

How nice of them to volunteer 2% of their paid customer base as "canary" without them specifically opting in to it, or perhaps even being aware.

Or perhaps they do it exclusively with the free service tier, which is much more understandable.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#6

Post by shusson » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

What happens after hot-fixing the release branch? Does the release branch get merged back into master?

Re: Deploys at Slack

#7

Post by jjeaff » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

brycethornton wrote: post #2

It's always nice to see how other teams do it. Nothing too groundbreaking here but that's a good thing. I did notice the screenshot of "Checkpoint", their deployment tracking UI. Are there solid open source or SaaS tools doing something similar? I've seen various companies build similar tools but most deployment processes are consistent enough to have a 3rd-party tool that was useful for most teams.

Gitlabs pipelines and issues/merges UI is similar and open source.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#8

Post by friend-monoid » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #5

How nice of them to volunteer 2% of their paid customer base as "canary" without them specifically opting in to it, or perhaps even being aware. Or perhaps they do it exclusively with the free service tier, which is much more understandable.

Seems reasonable to me? Better to deploy gradually in case the deploy is bad, right?

Re: Deploys at Slack

#9

Post by capableweb » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

No mention of feature toggles what so ever. I guess that's why it took them a long time to fix the thing with the new WYSIWYG editor, where after 2 weeks or something, they offered a toggle for people to change back.

Anyone knows their reasoning behind not employing feature toggles? I would feel very slowed down if I didn't have the guarantee and confidence I could quickly rollback in the event of errors.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#10

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

friend-monoid wrote: post #8

walrus01 wrote: post #5

How nice of them to volunteer 2% of their paid customer base as "canary" without them specifically opting in to it, or perhaps even being aware. Or perhaps they do it exclusively with the free service tier, which is much more understandable.

Seems reasonable to me? Better to deploy gradually in case the deploy is bad, right?

If the users are aware and consent to being beta testers, versus what’s already likely stable (caveat being when you’re rapidly pushing out a hotfix because your last deploy broke something).