DEPLOYMENT ARCHITECTURES

LEARNING GOALS By the end of this chapter you will be able to describe the main ways to host and deploy a harness. You will be able to explain how a system scales to many users at once and how secrets and settings are kept safe. You will know how gradual rollouts reduce the risk of a new release. WHAT AN ARCHITECTURE DECISION IS An architecture is the high-level plan for how the pieces of a system are arranged and connected. When you deploy an agent, you must decide where each piece lives, how it grows, how it is configured, and how new versions are released. These are separate decisions, and treating them separately makes clearer thinking possible. This chapter covers four areas: hosting models and harnesses, scaling to many concurrent users, configuration, secrets, and environment management, and release strategies including gradual rollout.