How do you test and deploy code changes in a cloud environment?

All big providers have really good and almost the same services, you should be aware of the next point before starting. When selecting a cloud service provider, prioritize adherence to legal regulations in your country. Ensure the provider complies with data protection laws, privacy regulations, and any industry-specific requirements. Legal conformity safeguards your data and operations, reducing the risk of legal issues and ensuring a trustworthy partnership. Always verify the provider's commitment to compliance with local laws before making your decision.

For version control, you should meet the following points: 1. Choose the correct branching strategy for your app: Adopt a branching strategy to meet with continuous integration, minimizing conflicts, and accelerating feature delivery. 2. Environment Branching: Implement environment-specific branches for testing and production, ensuring a controlled deployment process. Enhances stability and maintains a structured deployment lifecycle. 3. Pull Request Size Guidelines: Set guidelines for smaller pull requests, improving review efficiency and minimizing errors 4. Release Versioning Strategy: Establish a consistent versioning strategy for effective communication and dependency management.

Choosing an automated testing and deployment strategy should align with product requirements. For instance, full automated release deployment may not always be necessary, especially when the product has critical implications for human life. Concerning testing, consider incorporating the following steps: 1. Integration testing to assess how well microservices or modules interact. 2. Implement a quality gate with established metrics that notify of releases not meeting the criteria. API and contract testing to verify integration at communication levels within and outside the system. 3. Load testing to evaluate system performance. 4. Security testing to ensure the security of all components and code, including comprehensive checks.

An excellent solution would be to implement monitoring and failure notification tools, including within the Ci/CD pipeline. - Monitoring helps assess resource consumption at different levels: a. Hardware level (servers, networks, etc.) b. Container level c. System component level - Additionally, it's crucial to incorporate logging into all critical areas of the system for a comprehensive understanding and the ability to build a robust failure notification system - An alerting system notifies engineers/support of system failures or malfunctions. It's advisable to introduce notification levels and various groups for handling them based on criticality. Also, bear in mind that alerts without corresponding reactions are a bad practice

Avoid premature optimization, as it often leads to improper system design. Approach optimization with a clear understanding of product requirements and key indicators Optimization should primarily aim to improve key product metrics and enhance the customer experience. In the absence of clear metrics, start by: - Identifying critical functionality - Digitizing it from the customer's perspective - Establishing the relationship between key metrics and the product's impact Before beginning optimization: - Cover code with unit and integration tests (if not covered yet) - Prepare load tests and data for re-testing - Conduct code optimization - Run tests to verify results