Deployment policy

Deployment Policy

EFFECTIVE: 4 May 2021

Policy

When deploying to production or making releases, you must get approval from another team member with access to that change.

You may make a change without approval if you're change is low risk or essential to operations.

Changes that don't need approval include (but aren't limited to):

Replacing API keys
Normal apt updates, excluding service restarts
Fixing security bugs
Documentation updates that pass CI
All changes to the dedicated beta instance.

If you need to restart a service, you should ensure downtime is minimised. MariaDB is a special case and should be done in read only.

After deployment

After you deploy, you must test your change to ensure it works and should check logs and give time to ensure issues do not arise. This is to ensure stability, and help address any problems that may occur as a result of a deployment. You may also ask someone else to do this properly.

Questions

Any questions, or comments? Please contact the current Technical Lead. You are advised to use sense when applying policy. If you use sense, you will be fine.

Holidays

Please be aware that deployments may be suspended during holiday periods like Christmas where sysadmins are more likely to be unavailable. This is at the direction of the management team. During a deployment suspension, only security updates may go ahead unless approved by another director.

You must file a task and log all commands that may make a change ran on server during a deployment suspension.

Confirmed No Deploy Days

Date: reason
From 00:01 UTC 2nd June 2022 -> 07:00 UTC 6th June 2022: UK Jubilee Extended Weekend
From 16:30 UTC 26th August 2022 -> 08:30 UTC 6th September 2022: Summer break for August bank & Labour day
From 10:00 UTC 8th November 2022 -> 23:59 UTC 8th November 2022: US Elections
From 16:29 UTC 15th December 2022 -> 09:00 UTC 4th January 2023: End of Year Freeze