Release XL - Comparison to GL: Deployments

Overview

Xebia Labs view deployments and releases as two separate items, in GL - they are more synonymous. We may need to clarify how GL supports various types of deployments.

Product review

Deployments in XL

XL distinguishes deployments as a part of releases in three groups and interacts with another module in XL referred to as XL Deploy:

  • Blue/Green deployments - a pattern of two environments where blue is live, and green in non-live so if any thing happens there is redundancy of production

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  • Canary Release deployments - is a pattern where a small subset on your production environment is used to test out new features

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  • Deployment rollbacks - Rollbacks a managed by tasks in XL Release. XL manages this through defined procedures to handle the situations you face regularly and interact appropriately with your deployment tooling

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Environments

XL supports management of environments, this is not a particularly novel experience, and affords GL the opportunity to add value for users.

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Tasks as a release component support a wide range of functionality in the workflow sense, which means for users, GL needs to be thoughtful on the release task use case and how we will support the data/information/triggers/actions necessary to effectively support release orchestration. This is detailed in issue #122712 (closed).

XL Orchestrator

Within the XL interface users can specify how to run deployments and where to run them to. For example, there are pre-built options to run parallel deployments to containers, sequential deployments to the cloud, or parallel by groups, or subgroups.

What this means for GitLab

This is where ~"group::release management" and ~"group::progressive delivery" can be complimentary to manage these XL deploy and XL release offerings. GitLab can differentiate itself in the category by having superior environment management. Areas to provide more prescriptive support for rollbacks would be to deliver the linkage on Releases and Runbooks for rollbacks, as well as providing a template for this activity.

Edited by Jackie Porter