Perform Las Vegas 2020: Reduce risk and iterate faster

Learn how to reduce risk and iterate faster – the right way to deploy canary, blue/green and feature flags in our Release Better Software Faster track.

The right way to deploy canary, blue/green and feature flags

As a part of the “Release better software faster” breakout track at Perform Las Vegas 2020, I’ll be presenting a session concentrating on deployment models and how to reduce risk and iterate faster. This breakout session will discuss the deployment models available for cloud implementations and how Dynatrace helps in iterating faster deployments.

From big bang to progressive deployments

In the past, monolith architectures could only be implemented with big bang deployments which result in a slow pace of innovation and significant downtime. However, with the advancement of DevOps and continuous delivery, cloud-native landscapes have provided innovative deployment models which are aimed to provide the following:

• Shorter release cycles, with the goal of getting features to customers faster
• Customer feedback loops which include the product team earlier
• Quicker problem and issue resolution

Different deployment models

In this session, we’ll introduce different deployment models to help you reduce your risk and iterate faster, including:

• Feature Flagging
• Canary Releases
• Blue/Green Deployments

The goal of introducing these elements is to help you understand how can these strategies can be implemented, as well as their specific strengths and drawbacks for different use cases. We’ll also discuss methodologies and tools (Spinnaker, Launch Darkly, etc.) that make deployments easier.

Utilizing Dynatrace to reduce the risk and iterate faster

With an increase in the number of deployments and frequency, there also comes an increase in the complexity of applications. Validating a deployment ensures that it’s not negatively impacting the end-user experience, that optimal performance is reached, and that all the business features are implemented.

Dynatrace provides built-in features, such as tagging, adding deployment events, and request tagging to mark and compare deployments for performance and feature parity. My session will cover various options, such as:

• Tagging different deployments
• Utilizing our API to send deployment information to Dynatrace
• Using the Davis® assistant for comparison and benchmarking
• Creating dashboards highlighting business analytics of each deployment.

Customer story

And, joining me in my sessions as a co-presenter will be Marek, from a Financial Institution, to demonstrate how they are using Dynatrace to validate their Blue/Green Deployments in their organization.

At Perform Las Vegas 2020, please join me and Marek on Thursday, February 6^th from 12 – 12:45 PM to learn more on how you can reduce your mean time to innovation and achieve better deployments. And, if you want to hear from more of our Dynatrace experts and customers, check out all our Breakout Sessions in our full agenda here.