Deployment board idea
For my own use, I have created a board to help manage deployments of dependent applications and switch branches in the dev/stage environment. I use the Azure platform and realize that you can do this in the UI, but it seems to be a pain to check the different application deployments and verify branches/versions.
Is this something you would find helpful or do you already have other tools you like for this purpose?
No, i don't think this is going to fly. Indies have usually very simple deployment of 1 or 2 components so they don't need this. Beyond indie size deployments are automated, and often integrated with APM and other tools that show automatically same stuff as your manual board. Sorry.
Thank you for the response. I agree that indie projects might not be the right target, but I assume that many indie hackers are working for larger companies while working on side projects.
I also agree that deployments should be automated, but switching between branches in dependent systems seems pretty manual - do you have a link to a system that allows for this on the fly and also allows you to see the deployments across systems?
I don't quite follow you with the manual branch switching or why manual branch switching would be required. Automated deployments will build and deploy whatever branches you tell them to.
As for "seeing deployments across systems", there can be half a dozen tools in single pipeline that show the same info: automated deployment systems usually keep track of it right there, and if you use cluster management that'll know the version, then it gets logged to couple of places, pushed to APM tool, and probably more.
So that is "over served" need, and it ain't done with a manual board, sorry.
And instead of a link, just start Googling around devops, it is as entire industry segment these days.
Maybe this misses the point of the question, but having shipped production systems - monolith and micro services alike - my best answer is to automate as much as possible.
Break said automation down into small isolated parts just like any other software system and unit test as much as is reasonably possible.
For my own projects I also tend to lean towards platforms like Netlify and Zeit that minimize what I have to do even there.
On those platforms (serverless) if you need orchestration, Zapier is 💯 for that.
I recently built https://thedailystartup.club as a static site with an Airtable backend. A Zap triggers a rebuild early each morning and a deploy to Netlify. Plus a changed endpoint triggers another Zap that queues up some content to HootSuite.
PS I do work for Zapier (though I’m home sick today - as opposed to home working - we’re all remote 😅)
Thank you for the response. Everything is currently automated except for having to go through and get branches switched and quickly see what is deployed across the dependent systems. Would one of the tools you mentioned give you a board to allow you to do this?
Ah, I see. No, I don't have or know of anything which handles that per se...
In my experience, we either stand up per-branch environments as-needed or have fixed
development,qa,productionetc... environments.In the per-branch case, the creation of the entire environment is automated.
Exactly, if you have fixed environments but want to be able to switch the dependent deployments. Say QA wants to switch to everything related to feature x - I probably did a bad job of explaining it.
I hope you are starting to feel better!
So feature switches across the whole environment accessible from a single dashboard?
Thanks for helping with my understanding!
And thanks for the well wishes 😊