Cloud Parts

Delivery

From a commit to running in production.

10 concepts · 12 technologies · 1 comparison

Concepts

Start with Version control
  1. Version control1 technologyRecord every change to the code as a commit, so anyone can see who changed what, when and why, and get any earlier version back.
  2. Branching strategiesA team’s rules for how changes flow into the shared code and out to releases: which branches exist, how long they live, and how they get merged.
  3. Commit conventionsShared rules for what goes into one commit and how its message is written, so the history explains itself and tools can read it.
  4. Build toolsTurn source code into runnable artifacts, rebuilding only what changed since last time.
  5. CI/CD pipelines4 technologiesAn automated path from a commit to production.
  6. Rolling deploymentsReplace the instances of a service a few at a time, so it keeps serving while the new version takes over.
  7. Blue-green deploymentsRun two full copies of production, release to the idle one, then switch all traffic over at once; switching back is the rollback.
  8. Canary releasesSend a small share of real traffic to the new version, compare it with the old one, and widen the share only while it looks healthy.
  9. Infrastructure as code6 technologiesDescribe your infrastructure in files and let a tool build it.
  10. Local cloud emulators3 technologiesA process on your laptop or CI runner that answers a cloud provider’s API, so tests and dev loops run with no account, no bill and no network.

Technologies

Grouped by the concept each one mainly implements

Commonly confused

Rolling, blue-green or canary?Rolling deployments · Blue-green deployments · Canary releases

Worth exploring

All resources →
Article· March 2023The Great Lambda Migration to Kubernetes Jobs: a Journey in Three PartsLiav Yona, InfoQA first-person account of how Firefly moved event-driven work off Lambda (after hitting the 15-minute timeout), briefly onto ECS, and finally onto Kubernetes Jobs on EKS, with practical notes on reusing container images, swapping an IAM trust policy for EKS OIDC, moving environment variables into ConfigMaps and a blue/green cutover. It is one company’s story with few numbers, and the author’s employer sells infrastructure-as-code tooling, which colours the emphasis on IaC.
Article· August 2022Deploying AWS Lambda functions using AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK)Rajdeep Saha, AWS Compute BlogAWS’s step-by-step tutorial for managing Lambda functions as Kubernetes custom resources: install the ACK Lambda controller in EKS, give it IAM permissions through IRSA, then kubectl apply a Function manifest that points at code in S3. It explains why you might (one GitOps and RBAC model for pods and functions) but, being AWS’s own post, not the drawbacks.
WebsitePlatform tooling landscapePlatformEngineering.orgA filterable map of tools for building an internal developer platform. Each tool sits in one of five “planes” (developer control, integration and delivery, resource, observability, security) and a category such as IaC, CD pipeline, secrets or developer portal, with a one-line description. Vendors can submit their own tools, so treat it as a list of what exists rather than a ranking.
WebsitePlatformEngineering.orgThe Platform Engineering communityA community hub for teams that build internal developer platforms: a blog, a Slack workspace, the PlatformCon conference, courses, and a map of platform tooling.
ArticleUsing Lambda with KubernetesAWS Lambda Developer GuideAWS’s short docs page on managing Lambda functions through the Kubernetes API, with either AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) or Crossplane, and the use cases for each (reusing RBAC and IAM roles for service accounts, GitOps, tag policies). It covers provisioning only: the functions still run on Lambda, not in your cluster.