New post idea: POCDR

[captain-kark]

POCDR ("Proof of Concept Delivery/Rollback") attempts to define a generalized CI/CD methodology for engineering the maximization of confidence in a production deployment.

Essentially, it is a logical extension of the canary deployment model, but for systems in which a phased rollout is not realistic or feasible. It does this by offering a more explicit strategy for applying overlapping concepts from the 12-factor app, cloud native, infrastructure as code, and Google SRE manifestos. While it does more or less rephrase inter-related points between those approaches, it does so in a way that specifically focuses on solving traditionally hard problems in changing production systems which:

• are mission critical
• have sensitive uptime requirements
• are on the write path
• struggle to justify the risks associated with:
  • adding new features
  • basic system maintenance (e.g, dependency updates)
  • decomposing responsibility (i..e., "microservice fragmentation")

Especially if they:

• have a write path which cannot be parallelized
• have a large "blast radius" of downstream systems
• rely on system-wide infrastructure with similar constraints
• is itself a said system-wide infrastructure component
• must detect erroneous system output and apply alterations afterwards

Kubernetes, kafka, cassandra, and git are referenced, but only for an example implementation.

Bedrock system components are expected to have a reasonable granularity to their access control features.

Include the "city water purifier" analogy.

Include a high level summary of the principles of a POCDR-compliant system, similar to the approach used in Google's SRE manifesto.

Includes a breakdown of the high level summary as a chart outlining the "Levels of Maturity", similar to how this article does it.