Announcement: Daily deployment cadence to GitLab environments
What changed?
Starting from 2020-04-29, the cadence of auto-deploy
branches changed from two times a week to daily (Saturday excluded). This means that all changes in master
branch of gitlab-org/gitlab, gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab, and gitlab-org/gitaly are reaching GitLab.com and the environments more frequently.
How does this impact me?
If you are a part of:
- Engineering group (part of any department that works with GitLab.com)
- Product group
this change has the potential of impacting your workflow.
Any change, including features, merged into master
branch of gitlab-org/gitlab, gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab, and gitlab-org/gitaly will be deployed to staging, canary, and GitLab.com environments more frequently than previously.
Previously, all non-urgent changes merged into master
were deployed:
- the same week if merged between Sunday and end of the workday Tuesday
- the following week if merged to master between the start of Wednesday and Sunday.
Going forward, all non-urgent changes merged into master
will be deployed the next day.
Deployments to canary and production will still respect changelock periods which includes blocking canary and production deploys on the weekend.
Positive effects of this change
The delivery team tested the sustainability of this workflow during the 13.0 release cycle. Starting from April 29th, every working day, we had at least one production deployment with changes merged the previous day.
During 13.0.0, we moved the average Mean Time To Production from about 55hr to 25-30hr.
With this change, we speed up the development/validation cycle, keeping the number of changes reaching production on each deploy as small as possible, and giving us more confidence in what we ship every day on GitLab.com
It was easier to find the cause of a problem in a smaller set of changes and react quickly.
Additional information
Please consult the releases handbook page for GitLab.com releases for a complete set of information.