Introduction to Continuous Delivery
There was a time where it was commonplace for companies to deploy new features on a monthly, bi-monthly, and, in some cases, even quarterly basis.
Long gone are the days where companies can deploy on such an extended schedule. Customers expect features to be delivered faster, and with higher quality. And this is where continuous delivery comes in.
Continuous delivery is a way of building software, such that it can be deployed to a specified environment, whenever you want to. And deploy only the highest quality versions to production. And ideally with one command or button push.
With this level of ease for a deployment, not only will you be able to deliver features to users faster, you'll also be able to fix bugs faster. And with all the layers of testing that exist between the continuous integration and continuous delivery processes, the software being delivered will be of higher quality.
Continuous delivery is not only for companies that are considered to be 'unicorns', it's within the grasp of all of us. In this Lesson, we'll take a look at what's involved with continuous delivery, and see an example.
This introductory Lesson will be the foundation for future, more advanced Lessons, that will dive into building a complete continuous delivery process. Before we can start trying to implement tools, we need to make sure that we have an understanding of the problem we need to solve. And we need to know what kind of changes to our application may be required to support continuous delivery.
Understanding the aspects of the continuous delivery process can help developers and operations engineers to gain a more complete picture of the DevOps philosophy. Continuous delivery covers topics from development through deployment and is a topic that all software engineers should have experience with.
Lesson Objectives
By the end of this Lesson, you'll be able to:
- Define continuous delivery and continuous deployment
- Describe some of the code level changes that will help support continuously delivery
- Describe the pros and cons for monoliths and microservices
- Explain blue / green & canary deployments
- Explain the pros and cons of mutable and immutable servers
- Identify some of the tools that are used for continuous delivery
Intended Audience
This is a beginner level Lesson for people with:
- Development experience
- Operations experience
Optional Prerequisites
What You'll Learn
| Lecture | What you'll learn |
|---|---|
| Intro | What will be covered in this Lesson |
| What is Continuous Delivery? | What Continuous Delivery is and why it's valuable |
| Coding for Continuous Delivery | What type of code changes may be required to support constant delivery |
| Architecting for Continuous Delivery | What sort of architectural changes may be required to support continuous delivery |
| Mutable vs. Immutable Servers | What are the pros and cons for mutable and immutable servers |
| Deployment Methods | How we can get software to production without downtime |
| Continuous Delivery Tools | What sort of tools are available for creating a continuous delivery process |
| Putting it All Together | What a continuous delivery process looks like |
| Summary | A review of the Lesson |
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this Lesson, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Ben Lambert is a software engineer and was previously the lead author for DevOps and Microsoft Azure training content at Cloud Academy. His courses and learning paths covered Cloud Ecosystem technologies such as DC/OS, configuration management tools, and containers. As a software engineer, Ben’s experience includes building highly available web and mobile apps. When he’s not building software, he’s hiking, camping, or creating video games.