The current accepted practice for deploying services is to deploy whenever a merge request is merged. The main benefits to this are shorter feedback cycles and decreasing the risk of each deployment (as each deployment only has a single change).

We would like to adopt this practice for privatestorage, for both our internal systems, and for our product deployment.

We need to make a number of improvements to our deployment automation to be able to do this.

• We need better automated tests of our complete system (both pre- and post-deployment).
• We need better observability into our running systems.
• We need the ability to easily rollback changes.
  • The system should be able to automatically rollback if it detects issues.
  • We need testing to ensure that we can safely rollback changes; both for our own software, and dependencies (particularly stateful ones)
• We probably want to be able to incrementally deploy changes to part of our servers, before rolling it out to all of our servers.
• We probably want to deploy a merge request before merge, either to a staging environment, or to portion of our production systems.

This is a large body of work, but we will start getting value from improvements immediately, without needing to complete all of it.

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Some issues related to this are in other milestones, with the Continuous Deployment label.