The safety of speed: How we ship code 180 times per day

At Intercom, the company achieves rapid yet stable code deployment by prioritizing speed as a prerequisite for safety, with an average deployment time of just 12 minutes and approximately 180 deployments each day. This approach counters conventional wisdom by emphasizing that shipping small batches of code reduces risk and maintains system integrity. The process is supported by a highly automated pipeline that minimizes manual intervention, ensuring quick progression from code merge to production while enforcing strict safety checks. The workflow promotes extreme ownership, requiring engineers to be accountable for their code's success in production and to be present during deployment, facilitated by features like Slack notifications and observability links. Feature flags and GitHub Scientist are employed to manage feature releases and test new code against existing behavior without affecting the user experience. The recovery model focuses on monitoring customer outcomes rather than system health alone, with rapid recovery mechanisms like automatic and manual rollbacks to address failures swiftly. This strategy allows Intercom to maintain high availability and fast recovery, leveraging incidents as opportunities to improve system resilience, thereby ensuring that fast shipping remains a source of stability rather than a liability.