Challenges in Practicing High Frequency Releases in Cloud Environments
Liming Zhu, Donna Xu, Xiwei Xu, An Binh Tran, Ingo M. Weber, Len Bass · 2014
Abstract — The continuous delivery trend is dramatically shortening release cycles from months into hours. Applications with high frequency releases often rely heavily on automated deployment tools using cloud infrastructure APIs. We report some results from experiments on reliability issues of cloud infrastructure and trade-offs between using heavily-baked and lightly-baked images. Our experiments were based on Amazon Web Service (AWS) OpsWorks APIs and configuration management tool Chef. As a result of our experiments, we then propose error handling practices that can be included in tailor-made continuous deployment facilities.