Release cadence, risk and package upgrade strategy
How to recommend a release management strategy: cadence and release size, error budgets, reading rework rate and change failure rate, deployment timing, why canary and blue-green stop at Heroku and MuleSoft, and how unlocked package installs, upgrade types and back-outs behave.
Given a customer scenario, describe and recommend an appropriate release management strategy.
~8 min read · 13 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Recommend a release cadence and size, and use error budgets, rework rate and change failure rate (separate metrics) to decide whether a release ships.
- Choose deployment timing from monitoring maturity, and say where canary and blue-green deployments apply.
- Plan unlocked package installs: dependency order, unpackaged metadata,
--upgrade-type,--apex-compileand what an upgrade does to existing components. - Plan a back-out and keep release tooling (Lifecycle Center, formerly DevOps Center) consistent with the repository.
Key terms: error budget (the acceptable failure rate agreed for a solution), deployment rework rate (how often unplanned deployments happen because of a production incident), change failure rate (the percentage of deployments that cause incidents needing remediation), blast radius (how much of the business one change can affect), upgrade type (the sf package install setting that decides what happens to removed components).
Key facts
- Detail
- Lead time, deployment frequency, failed deployment recovery time
- Detail
- Change failure rate and rework rate, two separate metrics
- Detail
- Hold releases; fix reliability first
- Detail
- Heroku and MuleSoft CloudHub 2.0 apps only
- Detail
- Mixed
--apex-compile in production- Detail
- All org Apex is compiled after install anyway
- Detail
- Re-created by the upgrade
- Detail
- Possible, but not a rollback
- Detail
- 180 days of setup history
Sources for this section (4)
- Why does a high deployment rework rate matter even when lead time is short?
- When can a team safely move deployments into business hours?
- Why isn't installing the previous unlocked package version a rollback?
- How can one release ship both package versions and metadata that isn't packaged yet?
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