Building a Ring-Based Release Process for Independent Team Execution

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Build a ring-based release process so the release team could run deployments without needing engineering to babysit every release. Ring-based releases are straightforward in theory (roll through internal, then limited customer set, then everyone), but operationalizing it for a non-engineering team meant more than just the mechanics.

It took:

Aligning versioning across multiple repos so a “release” was actually a coherent unit, not a loose collection of independently-versioned pieces.
Tagging artifacts and tickets consistently so you could always trace what code and what work was in a given release.
Building enough guardrails and automation that the release team could run the whole thing confidently without checking with engineering for every step.

The win wasn’t the ring pattern itself - it was taking knowledge that lived in engineers’ heads and turning it into a process someone else could own and execute.

Rebuilding a Lab Environment Deployment Pipeline From Scratch

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Lab and test environments have a tendency to accumulate complexity over successive iterations of “just add one more special case.” By the millionth version of our lab deployment pipeline, it had grown into something that was hard to reason about and expensive to maintain - lots of administrative overhead just to keep it running, let alone extend it. Deploying the pipeline also took far too much time.

This project was a ground-up rebuild of that pipeline with the explicit goal of removing accumulated complexity and reducing the administrative burden of maintaining lab environments. Rather than patch the existing pipeline again, I rebuilt it with a cleaner, more streamlined deployment process - fewer special cases, more consistent conventions, and less manual intervention required to stand up or tear down a lab environment. The overall deployment time went from 45 minutes to less than 25 minutes.

Ci-Cd on GeekyRyan

Building a Ring-Based Release Process for Independent Team Execution

Rebuilding a Lab Environment Deployment Pipeline From Scratch