Marcus' Blog

In order to gracefully deploy releases to our application servers, I wanted to utilize rolling deployments in Octopus Deploy. If you aren’t familiar, rolling deployments slowly roll out a release one instance at a time (vs. all instances at once). The goal of this being reduced overall downtime. To accomplish... [Read More]

Last week Microsoft announced “Pipeline as code (YAML)” giving us the ability to store our builds in source control. This allows us to take advantage of Configuration as Code as well as other benefits not available through the Visual Designer builds: [Read More]

My team wanted the ability to populate test data into new data warehouse instances (MySQL on Linux) that are created via Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation and Chef). They already had the SQL scripts they used for local development, so I would just need to setup a process to package and... [Read More]

This past week I started concentrating on optimizing our release processes. I’ve talked about how our team uses VSTS and Git in a previous post. At the end of a sprint, pull requests are created in all of our repositories to merge to the release branches. As the number of... [Read More]

I previously posted about how I discovered LaunchDarkly and wanted to introduce it at my current employer. See Part 1 here. Our pilot with LaunchDarkly went great. So great that we purchased a subscription. [Read More]