Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

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> If you fix some UI bug with a button in the React SPA, why would you also deploy the backend?

Why would you bother to spend the time figuring out whether or not it needs to get deployed? Why would you spend time training other (and new) people to be able to figure that out? Why even take on the risk of someone making a mistake?

If you make your deployment fast and seamless, who cares? Deploy everything every time. It eliminates a whole category of potential mistakes and troubleshooting paths, and it exercises the deployment process (so when you need it, you know it works).

It's literally automatic by configuring your workflows by file changes.

   > If you make your deployment fast and seamless, who cares?

It still costs CI/CD time and depending on the target platform, there are foundational limitations on how fast you can deploy. Fixing a button in a React SPA and deploying that to S3 and CloudFront if fast. Building and deploying a Go backend container -- that didn't even change -- to ECS is at least a 4-5 minute affair.

I get that, and like anything it's a matter of trade-offs.

To me, in most cases, 4 or even 10 minutes is just not a big deal. It's fire-and-forget, and there should be a bunch of things in place to prevent bad deploys and ultimately let the team know if something gets messed up.

When there's an outage, multiple people get involved and it can easily hit 10+ hours of time spent. If adding a few minutes to the deploy time prevents an outage or two, that's worth it IMHO.

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