Wrapping Up

To be successful, your software will be deployed early and often. That means the act of deployment is an essential part of the system’s life. Therefore, it’s worth designing the software to be deployed easily. Zero downtime is the objective.

Smaller, easier deployments mean you can make big changes over a series of small steps. That reduces disruption to your users, whether they are humans or other programs.

So far, we’ve covered the “interior” view of deployments. This includes structuring changes to database schemata and documents, rolling the code to machines, and cleaning up afterward. Now it’s time to look at how your software fits in with the rest of the ecosystem. Handling protocol versions gracefully is a key aspect of that, so we’ll tackle it next.