Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Source: Redislabs

Author: Shabih Syed

Translation: Kevin (official account: middleware)

In order to make the system run more smoothly and avoid the $460 million mistake made by Knights Capital in 2012, the one-day computer system failure of a leading financial market manufacturer provided some lessons to the IT community, including the design and implementation of system components, and the importance of DevOps. In this two-part blog, I'll share some ideas to help the development team keep its continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI / CD) process secure, and in particular, I'll show you how to use feature switches and feature contexts to manage continuous updates, how to create an easy-to-access log database, and a database of error messages that can be found quickly-all with Redis. Imagine that you are an engineering director managing a team of developers who are responsible for the front end of a Web application with thousands of concurrent users. Your application is deployed in AWS, you need to push a new version every week, and the company cannot afford any damage caused by the Web application, so if an error occurs, your team must immediately roll back to the most recently updated version. You must quickly identify the problem code, have the developer fix it, and release it later, and the product team always requires new features to be provided as soon as possible, so how do you respond to errors quickly? and launch new features at the speed of business needs?

At the 2019 Game developers Conference (GDC), I participated in an agenda with the theme "large-scale debugging: cross-platform stability with more than 70 million monthly active users", co-chaired by Redis Labs customers Roblox and Chris Swiedler, describing a software release process that can support weekly updates. Chris shared how his team modified the behavior of the application on Roblox without changing the code, which could reduce the occurrence of current network problems. They use feature tags, which are very similar to Martin Fowler's "feature switch" method.

Sample CI / CD process for new feature release

Let's break down figure 2, which outlines the methods that can be used as part of CI / CD and the classification process:

1. Developers begin to study new features

two。 Developers and product management teams decide which scenarios will use the new features (perhaps only for some users)

3. The developer proposed a switching strategy in which the new code and the old code are separated by "if and else" blocks

4. Once developers have finished developing the new feature code, they release the Canary version to the production environment (with the help of DevOps)

5. When using the application, people can execute new code or old code according to their roles and switching.

6. If there is a problem, you can set the toggle switch to false to transfer all users to the old code

7. After a while, this feature will be upgraded to the official release version (GA).

This strategy can help:

1. Release the canary version to production to test with real-time traffic and real users (not simulations)

two。 Disable the feature immediately without rolling back any code

3. Enable a function or combination of functions by toggling the feature switch

4. The responsible developer can be easily identified (for large development teams) by the metadata in the feature switch. However, this approach can be taken a step forward to help distributed development teams securely release new functionality and roll back new functionality with minimal impact as needed.

CI / CD of Redis Enterprise

Redis Enterprise is a great fit when you need a fast, persistent database. Its functions include:

Fully managed Redis database as a service with permanent network storage to prevent loss of instance data storage

Conflict-free replicable databases created across multiple RedisEnterprise clusters located in different data centers that provide highly available dual-active and active-standby deployments.

Powerful search capabilities (through the RediSearch module) allow you to run search queries across database clusters.

To make your CI/ CD offloading process more effective, in the next part of this series, I'll provide more details and code snippets to demonstrate how to use Redis to build feature switches, feature contexts, error databases, and log databases.

Original link: https://redislabs.com/blog/using-redis-to-optimize-feature-rollouts-and-error-triaging/

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