Release Process

A structured approach to version control, testing, and deployment of infrastructure automation code.

Development Workflow

Our release process ensures that infrastructure changes are thoroughly tested, reviewed, and documented before being deployed to production environments. We follow GitOps principles with infrastructure as code stored in version control.

🔨

Develop

Write code in feature branches

🧪

Test

Validate in test environment

👀

Review

Code review and approval

🚀

Deploy

Merge and release to production

Version Control Strategy

Git Workflow

We use a feature-branch workflow with protected main branches and pull request reviews.

Branch Structure

  • • main - Production-ready code
  • • develop - Integration branch
  • • feature/* - New features
  • • hotfix/* - Critical fixes

Commit Standards

  • • Conventional commit messages
  • • Signed commits with GPG
  • • Descriptive commit descriptions
  • • Reference issue numbers

Semantic Versioning

All releases follow semantic versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) to clearly communicate the nature of changes.

MAJOR

Breaking changes requiring manual intervention

MINOR

New features, backward compatible

PATCH

Bug fixes and minor improvements

Testing Pipeline

1. Syntax Validation

Automated checks for code quality and syntax errors.

  • • Ansible playbook syntax check with ansible-playbook --syntax-check
  • • YAML linting with yamllint
  • • Ansible best practices with ansible-lint

2. Integration Testing

Deploy to test environment and verify functionality.

  • • Provision test cluster from scratch
  • • Verify all services are running correctly
  • • Run smoke tests on deployed applications
  • • Validate networking and storage functionality

3. Performance Testing

Benchmark cluster performance and resource usage.

  • • Storage I/O benchmarks with fio
  • • Network throughput testing
  • • Pod scheduling and startup times
  • • Resource utilization monitoring

4. Acceptance Testing

Final validation before production release.

  • • Review deployment documentation
  • • Verify rollback procedures
  • • Check monitoring and alerting
  • • Stakeholder sign-off

Release Checklist

Pre-Release

  • ☐ All tests passing in CI/CD pipeline
  • ☐ Code review approved by maintainers
  • ☐ Documentation updated
  • ☐ Changelog generated
  • ☐ Version number bumped

Post-Release

  • ☐ Git tag created and pushed
  • ☐ Release notes published
  • ☐ Deployment verified in production
  • ☐ Monitoring dashboards checked
  • ☐ Stakeholders notified

Continuous Improvement

Our release process is continuously evolving based on lessons learned and feedback from deployments. We maintain:

  • ✓ Post-mortem reviews for major releases
  • ✓ Metrics tracking for deployment success
  • ✓ Regular process retrospectives
  • ✓ Automated testing improvements