During my time at Palo Alto Networks, I spent most of my time working on a product called AutoFocus. It helped cyber security research teams analyze files traversing our firewalls for signs of malware. It was pretty cool, fronted by a large React application, with a bunch of disparate backend services and databases scattered around.

One of the things that was difficult to do was deploy our software. We were on a roughly 3 month release cycle to begin with, which meant several things:

• Out-of-band bug fix releases were expensive
• We didn't get much practice deploying, so when we did, it was a team effort, error prone and took a long time.
• Trying to estimate and scope 3 months of work for a team of 10 is a fool's errand

Deployment meant getting most of the team into a war room, manually uploading build files to various places, doing a sort of canary deploy, seeing if things seemed ok, then rolling out to the rest of the world. Sometimes we decided to roll out architectural changes to reverse proxies and things at the same time, just for fun.