Imperative Deployments

Imperative Deployments, Competing Pipelines

In a very simple ecosystem, an imperative approach to deployments can be effective. For each target environment, the component promotion (the staging from Test to Production for example) can be timed by the DevOps engineer to ensure the combination of components that were tested are consistent with those that go live.

Drift, When things go wrong…

In this example, due to an oversight, the user interface was promoted to Production without the correct API version. The user interface fails in production even though it worked in test as expected, and a critical dependent API operation is now not available due to a drift.

Backend

Frontend

To add more complications, there is another version of the user interface in test now. What version of the API does it require?

This approach is not scalable, where an ecosystem has many components, and many environments, the complexity grows exponentially and the chances of manual errors leading to inconsistency increase.

See an alternative, Declarative Desired State.

Implementation Patterns with CDAF Imperative Deployment for pipeline constructs.