Tracking Every Release
codeascraft.etsy.com"At Etsy, we are releasing changes to code and application configs over 25 times a day."
Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but 25 times a day? I'm very curious as to the types of changes. UI tweaks? Bug fixes? Do they have to make a config change every time someone creates a new store?
Not judgmental, just curious.
When you have a good test suite, and automated deployments, eventually you move into the "deploy on every commit" strategy.
For more on this kind of thing, http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo... and http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/search/label/continuous...
Often 40+ times. 25 is closer to the average, though. UI tweaks, bug fixes, config changes, and quite a lot of work on unreleased features. We never do giant deploys for new user-facing features. When they're released they've been running in production well in advance, and the product release is just a config change.
Graphite definitely does not get enough love. It's an amazing piece of software, though can be a little rough around the edges sometimes -- I imagine it's improved a lot over the last year.
The idea to add markers for code deploys is great. Totally stealing that one.
It's wonderful. The documentation is very light, so don't be too turned off by that when evaluating it.
Would you mind elaborating on what types of things you are using Graphite for today?
Not using it for anything right now -- haven't had time to integrate the it into the stack at my new company. I miss it. ;-)
However, we used it for all kinds of things at my previous company: everything from incrementing a counter for every web request, database hit, cache miss, slow page (html generation time > a certain threshold), user action, what have you.