Industry Trends

We had an amazing time at this year’s AWS re:Invent in Vegas. We were able to chat with more than 2,000 developers, operators, and cloud architects that stopped by. A few observations: Feature flags were a hot topic. We chatted with quite a few organizations that are already getting value…

Staging environments aren’t great reflections of reality. Instead, investing in CI/CD, feature flags, and QA can skip your code straight to production.

It’s known that modern companies, especially the ones that have adopted agile principles, have achieved a faster degree of delivery cadence, deploy many times per day, diminished the risk of each release, and lowered the time to fix defects in production environments.  Feature flags are one of the few key…

Great teams don’t run experiments to prove they are right; they run them to answer questions. Guard against wishful thinking and hidden biases with this shortlist of core principles for productive online controlled experiments. (Video, transcript and screenshots from talk given at Pinterest HQ on September 13, 2019)

Last week we walked The Path To Progressive Delivery. This week, we go deeper. What goals can we meet with the Four Shades of Progressive Delivery? After you read or watch this week’s episode, you will be better equipped to choose a Progressive Delivery approach that works for you. My…

Last week I said I would start a two-part series on progressive delivery. Here’s the promised first installment. Whether you’d rather read or watch the video, let’s jump right in! First “Radical” Idea on the Path to Progressive Delivery: Continuous Integration The story starts with the birth of Continuous Integration.…

Last week, I spoke about the foundational idea of decoupling deployment from release. This week, let’s answer the question, “Why would I want to?” At a high level, there are really just two reasons: #1: You want to prevent code that’s still a work in progress from being exposed to users…

Recently, there was a very active twitter thread that started when John Cutler asked whether everyone knew about the idea of decoupling deploy and release: From the replies, retweets, and likes, it was pretty clear that not everyone knew about decoupling deploy from release, and how feature flags make that…

How do you know if your rollouts are going well and should be ramped up or are surfacing issues that need to be fixed before you ramp up? That’s the focus of today’s post and video.