I recently took the time to write down my thoughts on why successfully managing code deployments in an online architecture is so radically different from release management in a traditional software engineering endeavor.

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Perhaps most challenging is the pace at which competition moves. In the online world, I can have an idea this morning, an implementation this afternoon and every client of my service that shows up tomorrow will see it. In fact, things can and do happen much faster than that. You might think that rapid concept-to-availability push is reckless. You might be right. But, your competition is doing it.

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