Staggered Deployment
A Critical Strategy to Prevent Enterprise-Wide Outages
On July 19, 2024, a seemingly routine software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike turned into a global IT nightmare. The update, designed to detect emerging threats, instead caused widespread system crashes across millions of Windows computers. The impact was rippling through businesses of all sizes.
From small startups to multinational corporations, operations ground to a halt. Financial institutions faced transaction backlogs, airline operation halted resulting in delayed flights, healthcare systems struggled to maintain patient records, and manufacturing plants saw production lines idle. Even cloud services like Microsoft Azure were affected.
This incident exposing the interconnectedness of modern infrastructure. The scale of the disruption was unprecedented, highlighting the vulnerability of our digital world to even unintended errors.
Today I am going to talk briefly about the the how a company can minimize the effect of any incident by approaching a staggered deployment approach.
The Power of Staggered Deployment
Staggered deployment emerges as a crucial strategy in preventing such widespread outages. This approach involves rolling out software updates or changes gradually everywhere rather than pushing changes simultaneously across all systems.
Some companies such as Microsoft have ring system where they deploy features to ring 1 (canaries) then ring 2(early adopters), once that is successful then only it gets deploy to other user rings.
For ex,
Deploy changes to one instance of IT infrastructure and then deploy everywhere else
Deploy changes to couple of geo locations and then deploy everywhere else
Deploy some XYZ feature to few customers and then deploy to all customers (This happened with me in Facebook and instagram with having some additional feature which is missing from my friend’s profile 😅)
Key Benefits of Staggered Deployment:
Controlled Release: Updates are introduced to a limited number of systems initially, allowing for close monitoring.
Early Problem Detection: Issues are identified quickly and contained to a smaller subset of systems, minimizing widespread impact.
Rapid Rollback: In case of critical issues, reverting changes is more manageable when only a portion of the infrastructure is affected.
Continuous Service Availability: With only a fraction of systems undergoing updates at any given time, overall service availability is maintained.
Implementing Effective Staggered Deployment
To leverage the benefits of staggered deployment and prevent enterprise-wide outages, consider the following strategies:
Segmentation: Divide your infrastructure into logical groups based on criticality, geography, or function. Ex: Aws Regions
Pilot Testing: Begin with a small, controlled group to validate updates before wider deployment.
Gradual Expansion: Incrementally increase the scope of deployment, carefully monitoring at each stage.
Automated Rollback Mechanisms: Implement systems that can quickly revert changes if issues are detected. This can be incorporate in CI/CD (Jenkins or similar pipelines)
Comprehensive Monitoring: Introduce robust monitoring tools to quickly identify and respond to any anomalies during the deployment process.
By adopting a staggered approach, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of similar incidents.
As enterprise IT environments grow increasingly complex, the adoption of staggered deployment strategies is no longer just a best practice, it's a critical component of risk management and service reliability.
Tech professionals and business leaders must prioritize these methodologies to ensure the resilience and stability of their IT infrastructures in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Canarying… only if they used it