What Is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery is a software development approach where an automated pipeline prepares code changes for a release to the production environment. A critical aspect of modern DevOps processes, continuous delivery (CD) expands upon continuous integration (CI) to deploy all code changes to the testing environment or production environment after completing the build stage. When implemented correctly, the developers should always have a deployment-ready artifact that has completed a standardized set of tests.Â
Continuous delivery enables the development team to automate the overall testing phase – not only unit tests – to verify an application’s updates across various dimensions before they deploy changes to the customer. These tests often include load tests, UI tests, integration tests, and API reliability tests. This approach helps the DevOps team to validate updates thoroughly and preemptively discover issues.
What Are the Business Benefits of Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery can bring many benefits to businesses, including:
- Development velocity: By automating the build, test, and deployment process, continuous delivery helps to reduce the time it takes to get new features and updates to customers. This can increase the velocity of product development, allowing businesses to respond more quickly to market changes and customer needs.
- Security: Continuous delivery helps to ensure that the code that is deployed to production is of high quality and free of security vulnerabilities. By automatically testing and validating code changes, continuous delivery helps to catch and fix security issues at the earliest stages of development, reducing the risk of data breaches.
- Productivity: Continuous delivery helps to reduce manual effort and error-prone manual processes, freeing up time for development teams to focus on other high-value tasks. This can improve overall productivity and enable teams to deliver more value to customers.
- Sustainability: Continuous delivery helps to ensure that the delivery process is reliable and consistent, reducing the risk of failures or delays. This helps to improve the sustainability of the software development process, enabling teams to deliver high-quality products and services to customers more reliably and consistently over time.
How to Implement Continuous Delivery in Your Business
Implementing continuous delivery in your business can be a complex process, but it can be broken down into the following steps:
Adopt a DevOps Culture
Continuous delivery requires close collaboration between development and operations teams. DevOps is a cultural movement that emphasizes collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. The goal is to bring development and operations teams together to work towards a common goal of delivering high-quality software quickly and reliably.
In traditional software development, development and operations teams often work in silos, with limited communication and collaboration. This can lead to delays in delivery and a lack of understanding about the impact of changes. DevOps culture aims to break down these silos.
To promote a DevOps culture, it is important to encourage collaboration, communication, and a shared sense of ownership between development and operations teams. This can include regular meetings, regular retrospectives, and a focus on continuous improvement.
Implement Continuous Integration (CI)
CI is the practice of integrating code changes into a shared repository. It is the first step to achieving full continuous delivery. By continuously integrating code changes, teams can catch and fix issues early in the development process, reducing the risk of introducing bugs or issues in production.
To implement CI, teams can use tools such as Git and GitHub, which provide a centralized repository for code changes and support for automated build and test processes. By using version control systems, teams can ensure that all code changes are tracked and that automated builds and tests are triggered whenever code changes are committed.
It also involves automating the compilation of code, running unit tests, and performing integration tests. Automating build and testing can help reduce the risk of human error and ensure that the code is always in a releasable state.
Monitor and Measure
Monitoring can help identify areas for improvement, ensure that the process is working as intended, and track progress over time. This can include tracking key metrics such as:
- Lead time: The time it takes from when a code change is committed to when it is deployed to production. Monitoring lead time can help to identify bottlenecks in the delivery process and track progress over time.
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR) and mean time between failures (MTBF): MTTR is the average time it takes to recover from a failure or issue, and MTBF is the average time between failures or issues. Monitoring MTTR and MTBF can help to identify areas for improvement and ensure that the delivery process is reliable and resilient.
- Deployment frequency: Monitoring the frequency of deployments can help to track progress over time and ensure that new features and updates are delivered to customers quickly and reliably.
- Error rate: Monitoring the error rate of deployments can help to identify areas for improvement and ensure that the delivery process is reliable and consistent.
Conclusion
In conclusion, continuous delivery is a critical component of modern software development, offering many benefits to businesses. By automating the build, test, and deployment process, continuous delivery helps to reduce the time it takes to get new features and updates to customers, while also improving the reliability and consistency of the delivery process.
Also read: CloudBees acquires Electric Cloud to advance continuous delivery
