How Embracing Continuous Release Reduced Change Complexity

This talk is an experience report on the use of continuous  release engineering to automate administration of an in-house software deployment to a moderate sized fleet (less than 1,000 nodes).

At Google, the team I am on now uses an automatic process to take "green" builds from our continuous integration system and promote them to test, staging and production releases.  Unless an error is detected by automated checks, once a line of code has been committed to the revision control system it will appear in production approximately 14 days later.  My talk would describe our release process automation, how it differs from the manual periodic (approximately quarterly) releases done before, and how it has borne both unanticipated benefits as well as introduced new failure modes into our workflow.

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.