By Their Powers Combined—Monitoring and Automated Releases Are Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate

When moving to a continuous release deployment model it is important that you combine signals from your production and canary monitoring systems into the automation pipeline. With adequate instrumentation and configuration of your release processes you can be confident that only known good (regression free) builds end up in production while minimizing the necessary delays. Your production monitoring infrastructure is a valuable source of signals that should be an intimate part of your releasing (Unit/integration tests are not the whole picture). You don't want to automatically promote a build that has a performance regression any more than you want a fleet-wide upgrade to commence as you remediate a service outage.

Caskey Dickson is a Site Reliability Engineer/Software Engineer at Google where he works writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale." In online service development since 1995, before coming to Google he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and even taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at Loyola Marymount University. He has a B.S. in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an M.B.A from Loyola Marymount.