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Continuous Delivery Automation

2 posts · Sep 2020 – May 2021

What this trail covers

Grab has evolved its continuous delivery process with the development of Conveyor, an in-house solution built on Spinnaker. This evolution focuses on achieving deployment hermeticity, ensuring that deployments are reproducible and consistent regardless of the environment or execution count. Conveyor integrates application code, static configuration, and dynamic configuration as versioned artifacts, enabling hermetic deployments that improve confidence in production changes and simplify rollbacks. The system supports a tailored user interface and a pipeline-as-code DSL for easier adoption and extensibility.

All Grab trails
  1. Our Journey to Continuous Delivery at Grab (Part 2)This post details the implementation of deployment hermeticity within Grab's Conveyor continuous delivery solution. It explains how Conveyor tracks application code, static configuration, and dynamic configuration as versioned artifacts to ensure reproducible deployments. The post describes the production deployment pipeline, including acquiring deployment locks, generating release notes, automated approval workflows, canary deployments with automated monitoring and rollbacks, and the benefits of hermeticity in reducing deployment failures and engineering effort. It quantifies the time saved per staging and production deployment and highlights the reduction in failure rates.
  2. Our Journey to Continuous Delivery at Grab (Part 1)This post details the initial state of Grab's backend deployment processes, highlighting manual steps, coordination challenges via Slack bots, and the resulting slow deployment velocity. It introduces Conveyor, an in-house continuous delivery platform built on Spinnaker, designed to automate deployments. Key aspects include a simplified user interface, a pipeline-as-code DSL (Artificer) for easier onboarding, and the foundational principles of hands-off deployments, confidence building, extensibility, and cloud-agnosticism.