I am deploying a web app onto multiple servers. I would like to push code to one of these servers so that it can be updated but not affect the other deployed servers. The web app and server is unique to each client so if I add a feature for one client I would not like to add it to all the other servers that are deployed. There will be occasions where an update might be required for all the active servers.
I am hoping to automate this functionality so that I can push code for one server without it affecting the other servers. I have been looking into using Docker, Ansible, and Kubernetes for this job but am fairly new to deployment in general and would like to get an idea of the best practices for something like this.
Thank you.
It is now deployed as a stand alone web server where a push to the master branch causes an automatic deployment for that one server. The only solution I've come up with is deploying multiple servers individually.
Your question is not strictly related to Docker/Kubernetes but I will try to answer anyway. There are two ways this could be done
1) Maintain a repo for each customer - which has the customer's customization and pulls the common code from somewhere else. Maybe a Git submodule or some other way. This way each customer can have their own lifecycle. I don't like this approach because the drift between customer tends to get bigger. Also, it is like maintaining as many codebases as there are customers - which is not scalable
2) The only way I can think of this can be done in a way which is uniform for all customers is to do feature flags. This has to be during development and is not a purely operational exercise. This is difficult to get started but in longer-term is the only way I think this can be scaled. Specific features for the one customer then can be turned off by configuration. There are also some companies like LaunchDarkly which enable this