Video: Canaries in the CloudFront

At Demandbase, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like AWS CloudFront plays a crucial role in application architecture by providing edge caching. This allows static assets, such as those from a React app, to be stored and delivered efficiently from locations closer to the user, improving load times and overall user experience.

Demandbase uses a CI/CD system that integrates with GitLab to run scans, security checks, linting, and unit tests whenever changes are made. The system supports building the full application and deploying it to a staging environment, where further integration and regression tests are conducted before a weekly production deployment.

At Demandbase, 'shifting left' refers to the practice of integrating and testing features earlier in the development cycle. This includes allowing non-developers like UX designers and PMs to review changes more efficiently using the GitLab pipeline and Lambda at Edge for CDN path rewriting, and running integration tests directly on branch merge requests.

Demandbase uses feature flagging to control the rollout of new features, ensuring consistency within customer tenant experiences. This approach allows them to test new builds and features selectively without affecting all users, thus maintaining a stable and consistent user experience during the testing phases.

Integrating CloudFront as a CDN in Demandbase's development process offers significant benefits such as reduced latency by serving content from the nearest edge location, enhanced content delivery speeds, and improved overall application performance and user satisfaction.

Canary releases at Demandbase involve deploying new developments to a staging environment to run extensive tests before making them part of the release candidate. This process uses a GitLab pipeline that builds a canary package and deploys it for testing, facilitated by Lambda at Edge for routing and feature flag management tools like LaunchDarkly.