Continuous Deployment allows teams to get immediate feedback, debug, iterate, and fail fast, ultimately getting a better product into the hands of users faster. In this talk, Kendra and Celia will talk about the challenges and benefits of continuously deploying their staging environments and how they applied that to their production environment during the development of CockroachCloud. They will discuss their use of: Iterative development including PR structure and feature decomposition Pushing all PR to staging environment Feature Flags to make the customer magic happen

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CONNECTIVITY COMPANY
Destination:
Automation
Continuous Deployment for
Staging and Production
Environments
San Francisco, CA
July 2020
THE CLOUD CONNECTIVITY
COMPANY
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CONNECTIVITY COMPANY 2
Celia La
Software Engineer
Cockroach Labs
Kendra Curtis
Director of Engineering
Cockroach Labs

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DBasS offering of CockroachDB
Web offering to set-up, configure
and monitor the Database.
Background:
What is CockroachCloud?

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Background:
CockroachCloud
Architecture
Console is single application
managing multiple customer
accounts and DBs
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Console Deployment Environment

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Goal
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“Take advantage of our environment to get immediate feedback,
debugging, iterate and fail fast”

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Possible Solutions
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+ Continuous Deployment
+ Feature can be enabled/disable at any
time
+ Risk Mitigation
+ All in one place
- New features may affect existing
application
+ Guaranteed Feature Isolation
- High Maintenance Costs
- Merge Conflicts
Branches Feature Flags

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Common reasons to use Feature Flags
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● Strategic Rollout (Dark launching, Gradual rollout)
● Continuous Delivery (CD) / Continuous Integration (CI)
● Split testing (AB tests, Engineering KPIs)

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CONNECTIVITY COMPANY
Goal
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“Take advantage of our environment to get immediate feedback,
debugging, iterate and fail fast”

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CONNECTIVITY COMPANY
Common Our reasons to use Feature Flags
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● Strategic Rollout (Dark launching, Gradual rollout)
● Continuous Delivery (CD) / Continuous Integration (CI)
● Split testing (AB tests, Engineering KPIs)
Get immediate feedback & debug/iterate/fail fast

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Strategic Rollout of CockroachCloud features
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● Ability to turn a feature fully on or off
● Ability to turn on/off for individual organizations
● Ability to turn on/off levers without a code change
Feature Flag Design Needs:
● More granular levers not needed (sufficient to toggle per organization)
Non-Needs:

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Feature Flags for Continuous Delivery / Integration (CD/CI)
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● All merged PRs merged directly to
master (CI)
● Triggers automatic deploy to staging
● Regular releases to production (CD)
Deployment Flow Feature Flags
● Initial PRs contain new flag, with feature in
following PRs
● Rollout process:
○ Internal Employees/Services
○ 1-2 Beta partners for feedback
○ Increase user until feature is fully on

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Strategic
Feature Rollout
Each flag can have:
● a default value (all
on/off), or
● can be flipped on/off
per organization
Many features gated behind
multiple flags
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Feature Development for CockroachCloud
Deployment flow (CI / CD) Gradual rollout, feedback (Feature Flags)

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Feature Flags, other design considerations
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● Easy for developers to create and use new flags
● Ability to quickly turn off flags (without code changes)

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Feature Flags, ease of creation

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Feature Flags, ease of use

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Feature Flags, ease of turning on/off

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● Continued development of new features
● 40% growth rate in production clusters since our beta launch, as of July 2020
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Development Timeline, using Feature Flags
● Implemented Feature Flags, Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)
● Allowed for alpha users, while continuing to build out new features
● Beta launch with MVP feature set
2019
2020

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Thank you
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test
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Official logo, font, artwork, etc:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0BxmhCXr_QQfHbFVTS1BuN
WplbFk
Brand Guidelines:
https://konghq.com/brand/
Other Design Resources
Branding Assets

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Iconography
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TINY ICONS
Access all Kong iconography here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DZE4TpyEEFtTYvlI0u9f8BJZmnrjhqih?usp=sharing
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Block Title Icon
Database
DIAGRAMS
Template
Plugin
Access all existing Kong diagrams here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TJkhy3TVIkj0Mw-XvAmGo38RF5q8zKqb?usp=sharing

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