Safer automated deployments with new Cloud Deploy features

Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery platform that automates the delivery of your application. On top of existing automation features, customers tell us they want other ways to automate their deployments to keep their production environments reliable and up to date.

We're happy to announce three new features to help with that, all in preview.

1. Repair rollouts

The new repair rollout automation rule lets you retry failed deployments or automatically roll back to a previously successful release when an error occurs. These errors could come in any phase of a deployment: a pre-deployment SQL migration, a misconfiguration detected when talking to a GKE cluster, or as part of a deployment verification step. In any of these cases, the repair rollout automation lets you retry the failed step a configurable number of times, perfect for those occasionally flaky end-to-end tests. If the retry succeeds, the rollout continues. If the retries fail (or none are configured) the repair rollout automation can also roll back to the previously successful release.

2. Deploy policies

Automating deployments is powerful, but it can also be important to put some constraints on the automation. The new deploy policies feature is intended to limit what these automations (or users) can do. Initially, we're launching a time-windows policy which can, for example, inhibit deployments during evenings, weekends, or during important events. While an on-caller with the Policy Overrider role could "break glass" to get around these policies, automated deployments won't be able to trigger a rollout in the middle of your big demo.

3. Timed promotions

After a release is successfully rolled out, you may want to automatically deploy it to the next environment. Our previous auto-promote feature let you promote a release after a specified duration, for example moving it into prod 12 hours after it went to staging. But often you want promotions to happen on a schedule, not based on a delay. Within Google, for example, we typically recommend that teams promote from a dev environment into staging every Thursday, and then start a promotion into prod on Monday mornings. With the new timed promotion automation, Cloud Deploy can handle these scheduled promotions for you. 

The future

Comprehensive, easy-to-use, and cost-effective DevOps tools are key to efficient software delivery, and it’s our hope that Cloud Deploy will help you implement complete CI/CD pipelines. Stay tuned as we introduce exciting new capabilities and features to Cloud Deploy in the months to come.

Update your current pipelines with these new features today. Check out the product page, documentation, quickstarts, and tutorials. Finally, if you have feedback on Cloud Deploy, you can join the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you!