Developers have been tasked with the need to deploy their code, quite often without the right tools. This has led to a common distrust of Magento. luroConnect’s CI/CD is a industry leading, well tested technology. This brings back confidence in Magento deployments.
Merchants want “depoy-at-will” freedom – an ability to confidently let a tested change be taken to production – from a friday late night to during a sales event.
luroConnect enables “deploy-at-will” with its CI/CD and processes.
Build without a db
This is a game changer technology all our customers get when they sign up to luroConnect. Magento was designed to build without a database and has tools and commands to do this. However, they were not very well documented or understood.
luroConnect connects 3 parts to make a deployable config.php. A core config.php in git which has module status. A config.php.themes which has store, theme and internationalization information. A config.php.build that has the build parameters.
This ensures builds are repeatable and the application confirms to the 12-factor app – a key guideline to a stable application framework.
Use a build machine.
Quite often, production resources are used to do a Magento build. This has the potential to slow down the production server, especially during high traffic time. This adds fear and an advice to build during low traffic times.
luroConnect builds on a separate build machine – which is used only during the build. Indeed our build technology allows us to use any server with docker to run the build, an ability to shut down the server when build is completed. What matters is the “deployable artifact” at the end of the build.
Easy rollbacks on deployment
All builds are identified with their git id and have associated meta data that helps in identifying the build. Most deployments can be easily rolled back with a click of a button. And since build artifacts are retained, the rollback is almost instantaneous.
Caveats being major Magento or plugin releases, for which an option to backup the database before a major release and rollback the code and database is also available provided the maintenance mode was not removed between deployment and rollback.
~0 downtime deployments
Simple deployment changes are easily done with no downtime. This gives confidence to customers to release even when a high sale event is in progress.
Our blue-green deployment scheme will even warm the caches, ensuring no slowdown as caches get refilled.
Granular control on which cache is cleared helps prevent frequent clearing of config caches, even when blue-green deployment is not selected.
Clean build each time reduces technical debt
A popular saying from developers is “it works for me”. And the blame will be on Magento’s behavior or the production system. As a developer is given production access to get it to work on production, a technical debt grows. Now, only this developer has the skill to keep the website running.
With the strategy of clean build, the developer is forced to think and analyze the change they made. A file not committed to git, a database dependency not highlighted and many other similar bad developer habits are caught early.
Staging before production
All luroConnect environments have a staging server and a luroConnect guarantee that if it works on staging, it will work on production.
Our staging maintenance includes restoring live database backup either on demand or as a daily schedule is available. This ensures all database dependencies of a code change are highlighted in staging.
Leading the way with innovation
We continue to listen to the developer community, with features like “patch build” useful for hot fixes requiring a small set of files to be deployed, improving hyva build speeds by running the “npm ci” and Magento compile in parallel and before the Magento static-content:deploy. Running mulitple jobs for static-content:deploy to match number of CPUs available.
All these features make luroConnect CI/CD, a healthy, compliant and secure system for developers to deploy code in Magento.
