The Staging Server is Dead! Long Live the Staging Server!
Edith Harbaugh, CEO [email protected]
@edith_h
@LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly.com
About Me
• Cofounder & CEO, LaunchDarkly
• Podcast Host, “To Be Continuous” @continuouscast
• BS Engineering Harvey Mudd College
• Engineering Manager, Epicentric & Vignette
• Product, Monster.com, EasyBloom, TripIt
• Marketing, Concur
@Edith_H
It’s time to kill your staging server
• Dark age of software
• DevOps
• Why you should kill your staging server
• Objections
• A staging server lives!
@Edith_H
Tsunami Software Releases
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DevOps
@Edith_H
@Edith_H
Development Change
Operations Stability
QA Reduce Risk
In a world where functionality is cheap, easy and reversible, how do organizations change?
@Edith_H
Development
Operations QA
STAGING
Traditional Software Development
@Edith_H
Developer Environments
QA PRODUCTION
Staging Servers Must Die
• Time
• Fall out of sync
• Expense
• Insecure
• Confusion
• Not validating true functionality
@Edith_H
The Better Way
@Edith_H
Developer Environments
QA PRODUCTION
Use Feature Flags to expose functionality when you want, to who you want
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Dial up/down the volume on your own timetable
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Advantages • True validation
• “You’ll never know all the issues a customer will see.”
• Instant Reversibility
@Edith_H
Objections • It’s too risky to push everything to production, untested
• Everything is never thoroughly tested. Better to have failsafe.
• What about for infrastructure? • EVEN BETTER – have a way to switch back,
rather than pushing everything live with no failsafe.
• Our contract says we must have a staging server • Why?
@Edith_H
When you might still want a staging server
• When stressing system to failure
@Edith_H
Kill your staging server • Move quicker
• Reduce risk
• Better quality software
@Edith_H
Launch, control, and measure your features
Edith Harbaugh, CEO [email protected]
@LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly.com
