Minimizing disruptions

During deployment, there are often tasks that can be considered disruptive or destructive. These tasks may include restarting services, performing database migrations, and so on. Disruptive tasks should be clustered together to minimize the overall impact on an application, while destructive tasks should only be performed once. The next two subsections explore how you can meet both these targets using Ansible.

Delaying a disruption

Restarting services for a new configuration or code version is a very common requirement. When viewed in isolation, a single service can be restarted whenever the code and configuration for the application have changed, without concern for the overall distributed system health. Typically, a distributed system will have roles for each part of the system, and each role will essentially operate in isolation on the hosts targeted to perform those roles. When deploying an application for the first time, there is...