Continous Delivery
Continuous Delivery is an extension of Continuous Integration (CI) that focuses on automating the process of delivering software changes to production-like environments. The goal is to enable reliable and frequent software releases.
It is the logical progression from Continuous Integration, enabling software teams to reliably and swiftly release new features and improvements. By automating the deployment process, maintaining environment parity, and employing deployment strategies, you can reduce risks and meet user expectations for rapid software delivery.
- Rapid Releases: Accelerates the time from code commit to production deployment.
- Reduced Risk: Automates the deployment process, minimizing human error.
- User Satisfaction: Ensures that new features and improvements reach users quickly.
Key Practices
- Deployment Automation: Automate the deployment process to reduce manual intervention.
- Environment Parity: Ensure that development, testing, and production environments are as similar as possible.
- Feature Toggles: Implement feature flags to enable or disable features without code changes.
- Automated Testing: Extend automated testing to cover various deployment scenarios.
Deployment Strategies
- Blue-Green Deployment: Maintain two identical environments: one live (blue) and one new (green). Route traffic to the green environment after successful testing.
- Canary Deployment: Gradually roll out changes to a subset of users for testing before full deployment.
- Rolling Deployment: Incrementally update parts of the production environment, reducing downtime.
Benefits
- Faster Releases: Shortens the release cycle, delivering features faster.
- Quality Assurance: Ensures that code changes are thoroughly tested before deployment.
- Risk Reduction: Minimizes deployment failures and their impact.
- Feedback Loop: Facilitates quick feedback from users and stakeholders.
Challenges
- Complexity: Coordinating complex deployments across different environments.
- Cultural Shift: Requires a shift toward automation and collaboration.
- Infrastructure Management: Ensuring that production infrastructure is reliable.