Updating the production environment or releasing a new version of the product always comes with risk. There are a couple of steps and actions that can be made in order to reduce this risk, some of them are preventive actions in order to reduce the risk if the minimum. However there are also best practices you should consider to reduce the impact on your customers when something goes wrong.
Here are the actions and best practices you should take take in order to dramatically reduce the risks during the release process starting from yor testing / validation phase all the way to post deployment activities:
- Test thoroughly your final version in a production-like environment, including functional testing, performance testing, and security testing to identify and address potential issues before release. Needless to say that as higher your automated regression testing level as lower your risks
- Conduct a risk assessment to identify potential risks in your release, such as security vulnerabilities, backward compatibility, dependencies etc.
- Develop a risk management plan that outlines how to mitigate or manage identified risks. This should include contingencies in case the risks do occur.
- Use a phased release approach, gradually roll out the release to a small group of users before a full release, allowing for further testing and feedback.
- Monitor and measure the release after deployment, measure its impact and effectiveness, and make necessary adjustments.
- Have a rollback plan to quickly rollback to a previous version of the release in case of any critical issues. This is not always a simple task especially in the cloud when updating multiple services including database updates. In such cases a safer approach will be to use blue green deployment with a predefined gates
- Implement a structured process for managing and controlling changes to the release, including a formal review process and approvals.Here again automation will reduce the chance for mistakes and human errors
- Train and educate team members, effective communication is one of the main keys to ensure that potential issues will be addressed instantly, mainly with Devops and Support. Provide training and education to team members to ensure they are aware of potential risks and how to mitigate them.
As always, continuously review and improve the process. Regularly review and evaluate the release process to identify areas for improvement and implement changes to reduce risks and improve the overall process.
As always, if more info or help are needed feel free to reach out at info@ngoconsulting.co
