4.1.2. Deployment

Deployment is the action that activates a set of changes that you did to your channels. It means that from the moment your changes are deployed, they start being applied to your production messages.

Before that, you can safely build your channels or make any change in your environment without impacting your live message traffic. You don't need to worry about incomplete configurations, set up errors, or incoherent transitional states. Your production messages will not be affected in any way by what your are doing in your environment, and will continue to be processed according to the last deployed configuration.

You decide when your configuration is deployed. Once you have properly tested your configuration and are ready to promote your changes to your live environment, then you can deploy your set up. 

In Babelway, there are two options: 

• Global deployment : every pending change in your environment will be deployed. 
• Partial deployment : you can cherry pick the changes that you wish to deploy (typically the ones on just one channel).

Global deployment

With the global deployment, every pending change in your environment will be deployed. 

This type of deployment can be very useful in small environments, when you want to be sure that everything you changed is now deployed, and that the configuration that you have in the application is really the one that executes on your messages.

But in big environments, when many people are working at the same time on multiple channels, it is typically not what people want. For example, if I want to deploy the changes I just did on a single channel, that would also deploy pending changes that other people in the team are busy with. They may not be finished or production-ready. In that case, partial deployment is the way to go.

To make a global deployment, just click on the Deploy pending action from the Channels grid page.

On the next screen, you will see all the elements that will be affected by the deployment. Just click confirm.

Partial deployment

Partial deployments allow you to deploy only some changes, and not all the changes that are pending in your environment. 

This is especially useful if you work in big environments, with many people making many changes to many channels at the same time. In that case, you only want to deploy the changes that you just did, and do not want to also deploy the (potentially unfinished) changes of your colleagues.

You can make a partial deployment the same way as for the global deployment, by just unselecting some elements in the confirmation popup.

But most of the time, partial deployments will be triggered through the ChannelDetail screen of the channel on which you are currently working.

Again, you will have the same popup listing the elements you will deploy. But starting from here, the interface will only show you the changes that are needed for the current channel. 

Run test cases

In the popup to confirm a deployment, a check box allow to Run tests.

By doing that, the application will guarantee to run all the test cases related to any of the deployed channels. If one of them fail, the deployment will be aborted.

This is a convenient feature to avoid deploying incorrect configuration by mistake. To make it super-effective, please be sure to add enough test cases.

Auto-deployment

Certificates, lookup tables, partners and documents are currently auto-deployed upon saving. All changes are automatically promoted to your live set up.

Be very careful when you update these elements.