Today we're excited to introduce the new Fast Deployment option for all our Maestro customers. Let's check it out!
What are Fast Deployments?
Our default behaviour for deploying changes to Maestro applications is to rebuild the entire application - config and code - and push it out to the cluster. This is the most reliable approach because it ensures that all changes to the application are deployed, with no chance of conflicts between configuration and code. But this strategy can also be quite slow, particularly when you just need to push out a small change to your code.
That's where Fast Deployments come in - they are designed to push out changes to code and/or images and run deploy commands (such as DB migrations), and to leave the application configuration and structure unchanged.
If you're working with pre-built images you can speed the process up even more by using the "publish only" option. This approach is particularly useful when rolling back to a previously built image (when a bug has snuck into production, for instance).
When should you use Fast Deployments?
Fast Deployments are designed with continuous integration (CI/CD) in mind. They allow your CI tool to quickly push out changes to your Maestro application with no chance of collisions between deployments. Unlike standard deployments, Fast Deployments won't block each other - we queue them and then execute them in the order in which they were received.
Fast Deployments are particularly useful for testing environments where risk is more limited, but they can be used in production environments with the appropriate level of testing (whether automated or manual). They can be extremely helpful when making high-priority patches or rollbacks on any environment.
How fast is "fast"?
Fast Deploys live up to their name. We tested one of our own production applications (with 6 services) and saved up to 77% compared to the standard deployment time.
Great, when can I start using them?
Fast Deployments are already available to all Cloud 66 Maestro customers. To trigger a Fast Deployment, visit your app's dashboard on Cloud 66, click the green Deploy button and choose "Deploy with options". Then click "More options" and choose "Fast Deployment".
For more details on configuring Fast Deployments please read our full how-to guide.