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Deploys at Slack

slack.engineering

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Re: Deploys at Slack

#91

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.

I think ArgoCD is close.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#92

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.

I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

Interested

Re: Deploys at Slack

#93
post #68
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain EC2, backend in PHP.

> Plain EC2, backend in PHP. That's slightly horrific. Weirdware NIH deploy system, no containers, PHP.

Look at almost all successful companies and they're pretty "boring" under the hood: GitHub and Stripe are Ruby on Rails, Facebook is PHP, Google is Java (still almost all new code written in 2020)... it gets the job done. Yes, they do some optimizations (HHVM etc.), but nobody is considering rewriting FB, Stripe or Google services in the language du jour.

The complexity of the infra and deployments are always relative to the size of the company, and no two companies are alike there. Small or big, it's all bespoke. Even if a few pieces are shared as open source projects, there's a veritable iceberg of complexity in the form of inhouse knowledge and tooling in each of the companies, there is nothing even close to a standard deployment system in either green field startups or FAANGs today.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anything that could even remotely give us what we wanted. We ultimately decided to roll our own devops management platform in-house which was 100% focused on our specific needs. We are now on generation 4 of this system. We just rewrote our principal devops management interface using Blazor w/ Bootstrap4. The capabilities of the management system relative to each environment are fairly absolute - Buil…

I'm curious what a Jenkins + Octopus system is missing that your system provides. Most companies would have a hard time justifying the expense to build a bespoke system just for devops.

Jenkins/octo, as tools, have their place but are just parts of the tooling you need when things go business critical or when teams scale up.

Most companies that run business critical services would be spending wisely putting effort down in building or customizing dev tooling and automations.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#95

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.

I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

Interested!

Re: Deploys at Slack

#96

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.

I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

Interested, especially in K8s based

Re: Deploys at Slack

#97

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.

I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

Interested

Re: Deploys at Slack

#98
post #68
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain EC2, backend in PHP.

> Plain EC2, backend in PHP. That's slightly horrific. Weirdware NIH deploy system, no containers, PHP.

> That's slightly horrific.

I'd argue that the contemporary infatuation with mastery of complex toolchains as being the only possible solution to modern technical problems is far more horrific.

Smart businesses focus on simple, effective solutions and avoid hiring engineers who obsess with rewriting everything using the latest over-hyped technology.

Re: Deploys at Slack

#99
It's cool to see how big organizations have deployment setups, while it feels like there is not enough resources about how one should setup a deployment system for a new startup just in the beginning.

The setup I currently use is custom bash scripts setting up EC2 instances. Each instance installs a copy of the git repo(s), and runs a script to pull updates from production/staging branches, compiles a new build, replaces the binaries & frontend assets, then restarts the service, and sends a slack message with list of changes just deployed.

It works good enough for a startup with 2 engineers. However, I'd like to know what could be better ? What could save my time from maintaining my own deployment system in AWS world, without investing days of resources to K8s?

Re: Deploys at Slack

#100

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.

I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

Interested!
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