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A Pipeline Made of Airbags

Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.

At another job, we took roughly 3 months to figure out and implement in-place upgrades of signed packages for embedded surveillance equipment (such as cameras in an airport) where you could roll out updates to production devices without needing to shut down the whole infrastructure and interrupt live security. Scheduled downtime more or less became a necessity in most cases, because you can't afford to blank out security coverage while you roll things out in critical systems. The idea is that you should be able to plug in invariants and still bail out in bad cases, but also have the option of just keeping things running when they go right: no cache to warm, no synchronization to deal with, no sessions to re-negotiate, no reinstantiation, fewer feature flags to handle, and near-instant deploys rather than having them take a long time.

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