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by NoahSussman 5533 days ago
Yes, most deployments contain only a couple of changesets -- ideally no more than a few dozen lines of code per push. And even these small changes are deployed behind config flags. Flickr has a similar continuous deploy strategy, see http://bit.ly/esoXiX

There is intended to be no end user impact whatsoever. Releasing behind config flags means that feature rollouts are decoupled from deploying code. New code runs "dark" for a long time in production. There we can log and graph and adjust its performance before it is ever visible to the user.

And of course, we can see dark features in production before they're released or even complete. This means that at Etsy we've been using and tweaking our features long before they are made public.

Since we've been closely monitoring and recording the performance of each new feature since its inception, we are highly aware of how that changes once the code is live to a known, small number of our users. Gather data, make adjustments, rinse and repeat until eventually the feature is live to 100% of users.

See also

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/04/how-does-etsy-manage-...

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...