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Best Practices

Best Practices for Deployment Validation

Learn the industry best practices for validating your deployments before they reach production.

Dec 5, 20247 min readConduii Team

Deployment validation is critical for maintaining application reliability. In this post, we'll cover best practices for ensuring your deployments work correctly.

The Deployment Validation Pyramid

Like the testing pyramid, deployment validation has multiple layers:

1. Health Checks (Base)

The foundation of deployment validation is health checks: - **Liveness** - Is the application running? - **Readiness** - Is the application ready to serve traffic? - **Dependencies** - Are all required services reachable?

2. Smoke Tests

Quick tests that verify core functionality: - Can users log in? - Can they perform key actions? - Are critical pages loading?

3. Integration Tests

Deeper tests that verify service integrations: - Database queries work correctly - External APIs are responding - Webhooks are functional

4. Synthetic Monitoring (Top)

Continuous testing in production: - Regular health checks - User journey simulations - Performance monitoring

Pre-Deployment Checklist

Before deploying, ensure:

  1. ✅ All tests pass in CI
  2. ✅ Environment variables are configured
  3. ✅ Database migrations are applied
  4. ✅ Feature flags are set correctly
  5. ✅ Rollback plan is documented

Post-Deployment Validation

After deploying, verify:

  1. ✅ Health endpoints return 200
  2. ✅ Key user flows work
  3. ✅ No error spike in monitoring
  4. ✅ Performance metrics are normal
  5. ✅ All integrations are functional

Automating Validation with Conduii

Conduii automates much of this process:

# Run post-deployment validation

# Output: # ✓ Health Check: All services healthy # ✓ Auth: Login flow working # ✓ Database: Queries executing correctly # ✓ Payments: Stripe integration verified # ✓ Email: Resend API responding # # All 24 tests passed in 12.4s ```

Handling Failures

When validation fails:

  1. **Don't panic** - Automated rollback should trigger
  2. **Investigate** - Check logs and error messages
  3. **Fix forward or rollback** - Decide based on severity
  4. **Post-mortem** - Document what went wrong

Continuous Improvement

Deployment validation should evolve:

  • Add tests for new features
  • Remove tests for deprecated features
  • Tune thresholds based on experience
  • Automate more of the process

Conclusion

Good deployment validation gives you confidence to ship fast. Start with the basics and build up your validation pyramid over time.