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DEPLOYMENTS.md

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When do ReportStream deployments take place?

ReportStream production deployments take place on Tuesdays and Thursday around 10am EST.

The testing and staging environments are automatically deployed on every merge into main through our Continuous Deployment pipeline.

How is ReportStream deployed?

We automatically deploy changes through GitHub Actions based on changes in target branches as described in the table below. These changes can only enter these branches through successfully reviewed Pull Requests.

Changes are merged into branch Changes get deployed into environment(s) Release Builds
main test and staging *pre-release (staging)
production production release

* ⚠️Returns "404 not found" if no changes have been merged since the last release.

The deployment process is zero-downtime with a blue/green deployment process used via Azure Function deployment slots. The deployment process is documented in PR #1318.

Our CI/CD pipeline does not run the Smoke Tests; therefor you must run the Smoke tests manually after every deployment. While this will change in the near future (i.e. in the future, they will be included in the pipeline), until that time, you must run the Smoke tests manually and validate they complete successfully before directing any traffic to the newly deployed code. You can track #656 for the status on running the Smoke tests automatically.

What is deployed?

The GitHub Action deploys changes in the following directories:

Directory Deployment Process
/prime-router New version released to Azure Functions
/frontend-react Static site served via an Azure Storage Account
/operations Not deployed. (Coming soon in, see #578)

What is our deployment process for production?

In preparation for our Tuesday and Thursday deployments, a cutoff time has been established.

Deployment Window Cutoff Time
Tuesday, 10am EST Monday, 12pm EST
Thursday, 10am EST Wednesday, 12pm EST

The cutoff time is automatically enforced via automatic branching from main into a dedicated deployment branch targeting the production branch through a GitHub Action.

  1. At the specified cut-off time (Mondays and Wednesdays at noon ET), the GitHub action creates a new branch named deployment/YYYY-MM-DD (where the YYYY-MM-DD is today + 1day, i.e. the date of the deployment, not the date of the branching) which branches from main. This branch now contains everything that was present in main at that cut-off time. This is the content that is/will be part of the production deployment.
  2. A new PR from the deployment branch is filed to merge deployment/YYYY-MM-DD into production. The PR has title "Deployment of YYYY-MM-DD" and is tagged with the deployment tag.
  3. The contents of main is deployed to the staging environment for verification
    • Manual testing takes place
  4. The PR is reviewed by the team
  5. The PR is merged during the specified deployment window by an approved team member.
    • Note: Special care must be taken if the release includes schema changes that add or remove data elements for receivers whose data is waiting for the batch step at the time of deployment.
    • Inconsistencies between data models and actual internal data can cause errors.
    • At this time, our solution has been to do the deployments at times when there is no work-in-progress (WIP) in the system.
  6. The GitHub Action deploys the PR to the production environment
  7. A smoke test is run against production

Reduce duplication in GitHub Actions

Steps duplicated across multiple GitHub workflows are not only difficult to maintain, but they also present a security risk when some steps are not implemented in a particular manner.

Risk example:

  1. The action to fetch a secret from Azure Key Vault will leak values to the GitHub Actions log if any method other than the env context is used to assign to a variable.

    A local action can be shared that already mitigates this risk.

For sets of actions (e.g. VPN, Azure login, build, etc.) that are shared across multiple workflows, local composite actions allow them to reside in a single location.

Branch restrictions (if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/production') can also be included in the local action to prevent unintended activity.