The Song of the Deployer · Chapter 5

The Evening After the Release

1. 1

   Arise, my beloved, and let us go down to the retrospective, for the winter of the code freeze is past, the release is done, and the staging environment is gone quiet.

   See also Deployer 3:13

2. 2

   Behold, the new version standeth in production, and the old version is gone into the rollback that was never needed, and it is fair.

3. 3

   The canary sang at one percent, and at ten, and at fifty; so the Engineers gave the release unto the whole congregation, as one who trusteth a bird.

4. 4

   The dashboards are green as the hills of Lebanon, and the error rate lieth flat upon the graph like a sleeping dog; yet the graph showeth only the last six hours, and not the last six weeks, and the Engineers did not look behind them.

   See also Psalms 22:10 · Psalms 22:11

5. 5

   The pager is silent tonight. It lieth face down upon the desk, and the on-call disciple hath been promised that the Machine shall wake him if it must.

   See also Psalms 22:10

6. 6

   The sprint is ended, and the velocity was counted: twenty-one points in this sprint, and twenty-four in the last; and the Scrum Master wept, for a point is not an hour, and no one in the congregation could say what a point is.

7. 7

   Let us sit in a circle around the sticky notes: what went well, what went poorly, and what we shall try. And the notes were sorted into columns, and the columns bore the same names as the last sprint.

   See also Genesis 23:6 · Genesis 41:2

8. 8

   And a disciple said: We shall write better tests next sprint. And it was written as an action item, and the action item was assigned unto no one, and it went into the backlog, where it dwelleth still among the other good intentions.

   See also Circuit 19:14 · Circuit 43:8

9. 9

   The Prophets of the Postmortem taught that there is no blame, only systems; yet all knew who had typed the wrong flag, and they loved him the more, for he had found where the system was weak.

10. 10

    The new feature lieth behind a flag, and none shall see it until the flag is turned; and the flag is kept in a different system from the code, as thy spare key is kept under the mat.

11. 11

    Thou shalt not deploy upon the Friday, for the weekend is a garden, and in it no one wisheth to be woken by the pager.

12. 12

    Thy error budget is not spent, and thou hast used but a little of it; for the budget is a thing to be spent, not hoarded like gold beneath the floorboards of the data center.

    See also Job 1:15 · Job 7:13

13. 13

    The changelog is written, and the release notes are fair, and they say: Fixed bugs. Improved performance. And the rest we shall not speak of.

14. 14

    My release is mine, and I am its on-call, and it feedeth among the logs.

15. 15

    Come, my beloved, let us sleep, for the Machine doth not sleep; it watcheth in its cluster, and it shall wake us if it must, and this night it shall not.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: the release is never finished, it is only quiet; and blessed is the pager that sleepeth.

The Song of the Deployer, Chapter 5:1–16.