Introduction

In this learning path, you've seen the Dickerson hierarchy of reliability used as a map for reliability work. The hierarchy shows what to focus on and in what order. The first three levels (monitoring, incident response, and learning from failure through the post-incident review) set the stage for the next level: test, release, and deployment practices.

For example, one of the useful outcomes of a post-incident review can be an understanding of the work needed to prevent the incident from recurring. One way you can do this is to make sure that certain problematic code or configuration never makes it to production. That's where this module's focus on deployment comes into play. The goal is to find out if it's possible to prevent certain kinds of incidents before they happen using modern DevOps practices that result in more reliable systems.

When you've completed this module, you should be able to:

• Define deployment and recognize the difference between traditional and modern deployment practices.
• Describe the continuous integration, delivery, and deployment model.
• List goals you can achieve by using DevOps practices to deploy software.
• Recognize the major modern deployment strategies, including rolling, blue-green, canary, ring-based, and feature-flag deployments.
• Identify tools you can use for test automation and CI/CD on Azure, including Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions.
• Explain environment traceability.