[Anthill-pro] Incremental Deployments

[Jeffrey Fredrick]

Looks like a good application of your "null release" pattern!

Jtf


On Feb 22, 2010, at 3:02 PM, Eric Minick wrote:

Last Fall, I discussed 3.7's ability to do incremental deployments out on
the blog. If you missed that post it's here:
http://www.anthillpro.com/blogs/anthillpro-blog/2009/09/25/1253900940000.html

Just recently, I modified the content deployment for AnthillPro.com to use
this technique. Our content deployment includes all the html, images, and
flash files used by the website but not the back-end code. I thought I would
share the results with the list.

Prior to this change, our deployments to Test took about 30 seconds and
deployments to production took 6 minutes. The primary difference was the
speed of moving the content (bundled as a zip) across the local network vs
across the WAN to our hosting center.

I had to change the build process to publish all the content as plain files
rather than bundled into a zip. This speeds the build process slightly by
skipping the packaging but costs us about 10% more disk space per content
build due to lack of compression. I then enabled the incremental deployments
and benchmarked.

*Benchmarks:*
In the worst case (every single file on our website changes) it looks like
the process would take about 7.5-8 minutes due to added overhead. However,
in the normal case where the content changes are just a few files being
modified, our production deployment drops to 2.5 minutes. The "artifact
resolve" step drops from 5.5 to 1.5 minutes and most of that time is spent
creating digests and validating files on the agent rather than pushing files
and using up network bandwidth. The results in our testing environment were
likewise pretty solid - we saw a reduction in deployment time from 30
seconds to 12.

Overall, our deployments are sped up quite nicely at the expense of a little
disk space. I'll take it.

Cheers,

Eric
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