This document discusses strategies for deploying Node applications at scale, including branching strategies, continuous integration, accelerating build times, packaging, deployments, monitoring, and testing. It recommends establishing branching strategies upfront, using feature flags, automating continuous integration tasks, building once and promoting everywhere, using orchestration for deployments, monitoring trends and errors, and functionally and performance testing applications.

1. Deploying Node
applications at scale
Shikhar Kapoor (@kapoorshikhar)
UI Engineer @ Flipkart

2. A modern front-end
engineers job
Webpack
React
Redux
Gulp
NodeAngular
Express
GraphQL
NPM
MongoDB
Grunt
Jest
Mocha

3. • Branching Strategies
• Continuous Integration
• Accelerating build times
• Packaging
• Deployments
• Monitoring
• Testing

4. Branching strategies
• Decide upfront and enforce them.
• Master is sacred!
• Feature flags are your friends.

5. Mainline/Master
Future
Feature1
Feature2
Feature3
Long release cycles

6. Shorter but fixed release cycles
Mainline/Master
Release - week 1
Fix
Feature
Fix
Release - week 2
Feature
Feature
Fix

7. Short cycles/ Daily deployments
Mainline/Master
Fix
Feature 1 *
Fix
Feature1 *
Feature 2 *
Feature 2 *
* Features get pushed to master daily, with feature flags

8. Continuous Integration
• Tools
• Automate mundane tasks like linting, unit test ..
• Build on merge
• Store artifacts

9. Pull request
Run tests
Tests
passing?
Merge/Rebase
Build
Fix
No
Yes

10. Accelerate build times
• Build once, promote everywhere
• BUT be careful of the gotchas
• Freeze dependencies (Yarn, Shrinkwrap)
• Offload mundane tasks to orchestrators

11. Get playbook Get hosts
Start
Run tasks
EndA typical orchestration workflow

12. Packaging
• How do you package and send your code to the
server?
• Git clone
• Archive and copy
• Debian (FPM, Post Install, Versioning, easy
reverts)

13. Deployment
• Manage your environments, keep them as
similar to production as possible.
• Blue-Green? Rolling?
• Keep your deployment scripts close and your
rollback scripts closer!

14. Production
Cluster
Blue green deployment strategy
Stage
Cluster
Load Balancer
Production
Cluster
Load Balancer

15. Rolling deployment strategy
Load balancer

16. Monitoring
• What should you monitor?
• Trends
• Stack traces/ deep dives
• How do you monitor?
• OpenTSDB based tools like Grafana for trends
• Sentry/ NewRelic for deep dives and stack traces

17. Image: http://grafana.org

18. Testing
• What to test?
• Functional - Automate critical flows.
• Unit tests
• Non-functional
• Capacity testing and API Fanout
• Performance
• RUM / Synthetic - SpeedCurve, Dareboost

19. Key takeaways

20. Thank you!
@kapoorshikhar