Deployment Guide

Overview

This guide walks you through the process of safely deploying applications to production environments. It covers preparation, best‑practice strategies, continuous integration pipelines, and rollback methods.

Prerequisites

• Access to the target environment (e.g., cloud, on‑prem).
• Configured ssh keys or service accounts.
• Version‑controlled source code (Git recommended).
• Docker installed (if containerizing).
• Monitoring and alerting set up.

Deployment Strategies

Choose the strategy that matches your risk tolerance and architecture.

Blue/Green Deployment

# Example using AWS Elastic Beanstalk
eb create blue-env
eb create green-env
# Swap CNAME when ready
eb swap blue-env green-env

Canary Releases

# Kubernetes canary using Argo Rollouts
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Rollout
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  strategy:
    canary:
      steps:
      - setWeight: 10
      - pause: {duration: 5m}
      - setWeight: 30
      - pause: {duration: 5m}
      - setWeight: 100

Rolling Update

# Docker Swarm rolling update
docker service update \
  --image myapp:1.2.0 \
  --update-parallelism 2 \
  --update-delay 10s \
  myapp_service

CI/CD Integration

Automate builds, tests, and deployments using pipelines. Below is a GitHub Actions example for Docker deployments.

name: CI/CD Pipeline
on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up Docker Buildx
        uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v2
      - name: Login to DockerHub
        uses: docker/login-action@v2
        with:
          username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_USER }}
          password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASS }}
      - name: Build and push
        uses: docker/build-push-action@v4
        with:
          context: .
          push: true
          tags: myrepo/myapp:latest
      - name: Deploy to Kubernetes
        uses: azure/k8s-deploy@v4
        with:
          manifests: k8s/deployment.yaml
          images: myrepo/myapp:latest
          kubectl-version: 'v1.27.0'
          namespace: production

Rollback Procedures

In case of a failed deployment, revert to the previous stable version.

Docker

# Revert to previous image tag
docker service update \
  --image myapp:1.1.0 \
  myapp_service

Kubernetes

# Rollback using rollout undo
kubectl rollout undo deployment/my-app --to-revision=2

FAQ

How do I test a deployment without affecting users?

Use a staging environment that mirrors production. Deploy there first and run integration tests before promoting to production.

What monitoring should I enable?

Collect logs (e.g., ELK), metrics (Prometheus), and alerts (Grafana, PagerDuty). Track deployment success rate, latency, and error rates.