11 - Deploy Fast, and Break Things?!

This episode of the Bikeshed Podcast features a discussion on the optimal level of deployment pipeline optimization, sparked by a company's desire to achieve five-minute deploys. The co-hosts, Scott, Matt, and Dillon, debate whether aggressively shortening deployment times is always beneficial, or if it can mask underlying problems and sacrifice stability.

Key Discussion Points:

• Organizational Velocity: The concept of organizational velocity is introduced, emphasizing the importance of moving as fast as possible in the right direction across the entire company, not just in deployment.
• Trade-offs: The discussion highlights potential trade-offs between deployment speed and stability. A core debate emerges around whether prioritizing a 5 minute deployment masks other problems.
• Confidence and Stability: The co-hosts discuss the need for confidence in deploys and the importance of thorough testing, staging environments, and canary deployments to ensure stability, especially for large, established companies.
• Feature Flags: Feature flags are discussed as a tool for managing new feature releases and A/B testing, but also as potential sources of complexity and integration issues.
• Realism vs. Idealism: The co-hosts explore the tension between striving for ideal, hyper-optimized scenarios and acknowledging the constraints and realities of smaller teams and existing systems.
• Continuous Improvement: The importance of continuous improvement and incremental optimization is emphasized, as opposed to large, periodic overhauls.
• Batching Changes vs. Immediate Releases: The conversation touches on the idea of batching certain updates instead of releasing every change immediately.