Honeycomb announced the new Honeycomb Deployment Protection Rule to support the public beta announcement of GitHub Actions Deployment Protection Rules.

Innovation is the lifeblood of any company. Yet increasingly complex and distributed cloud systems make it harder for engineering teams to predict the behavior of new releases when deploying their code to production. Deploying to production can be stressful for some engineering teams because they can't see small changes to application performance. Too often, these teams can only see issues once they've become a much bigger problem: impacting users. Honeycomb helps engineering teams confidently deploy features quickly and often by streamlining the build and release process and integrating observability into their CI/CD pipelines.

"Honeycomb's Deployment Protection Rule enables teams to improve governance within their CD processes in GitHub Actions by setting specific thresholds based on data within Honeycomb, ultimately ensuring only code that meets the customer's standards actually gets deployed to production," said Matthew Manning, Business Development Manager at GitHub. "This is important for organizations and developers, as it helps add an additional layer of protection that can help catch performance issues that might otherwise slip through."

In partnership, Honeycomb is thrilled to support the new GitHub Actions Deployment Protection Rules feature, an automatic gating mechanism for your GitHub Actions workflows. Before this release, only specific gating mechanisms (like manual approvals) existed for deployments in GitHub Actions. Now,  any GitHub App can provide deployment protection rules that make automatic deployment decisions in your workflows. The Honeycomb Deployment Protection Rule, available as GitHub App, lets developers use Honeycomb query results to decide whether it's safe for their deployment to proceed.

"In order to become a high-performing team that deploys confidently, you have to nail the art of doing less, which includes continuous learning, best practices, and tooling that helps you accomplish more with the same amount of effort," said Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. "No engineer ever got burned out from innovating and shipping too much. They get burned out from shipping too little relative to their efforts."

Allowing Honeycomb users to gate deployments with query data isn't intended to replace their pre-deployment CI checks. Instead, it's a complementary and additional layer of protection that can help teams catch real-time performance issues that might otherwise slip through CI unnoticed. Using real staging or canary data from Honeycomb to prevent a deployment provides additional safety against a CI/CD workflow catastrophically breaking production.