Honeycomb Launches Support For New GitHub Actions Deployment Protection Rules

The new Honeycomb Deployment Protection Rule provides real-time performance feedback giving users the visibility and confidence to deploy code quickly and more often

SAN FRANCISCO – April 20, 2023 – Honeycomb, a leading observability platform used by high-performing engineering teams to observe and investigate the behavior of cloud applications, today 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.

To learn more about the new GitHub Actions Deployment Protection Rules and Honeycomb’s supporting app, visit: https://bit.ly/3oqxg8A.  

About GitHub

As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the complete developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 330+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it's never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.

About Honeycomb

Honeycomb provides observability for high-performing engineering teams so they can quickly understand what their code does in the hands of real users in unpredictable and highly complex cloud environments. Honeycomb customers stop wasting precious time on engineering mysteries because they can quickly solve them and know exactly how to create fast, reliable, and great customer experiences. HelloFresh, Stripe, Slack, Fender, Vanguard,  LaunchDarkly, and many more rely on Honeycomb for fast incident response, performance optimization, and safely accelerating release cycles. Learn more at www.honeycomb.io and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Media Contact

Harrison Calato, Senior Corporate Communications Manager(E): harrisoncalato@honeycomb.io