Continuous Delivery In a Nutshell
In our nutshell post about Continuous Integration (CI) we briefly mentioned that CI is an important first step towards Continuous Delivery (CD) without actually defining what it means. In this post we`ll briefly explore the concept of CD and how it`s a very important step towards Continuous Deployment (also abbreviated as CD!) which will be defined in a follow up post.
What Is CD In Simple Terms?
Continuous Delivery is of course a natural extension of Continuous Integration. In a nutshell CD is an automated capability and practice aimed at enabling software developers to continuously with a single command or push of a button to deliver software from an environment A to environment B along the delivery pipeline including to Production. The environments making up the delivery pipeline are normally Development (Dev), Quality Assurance (QA) and Production (Prod).
What`s the Point of CD?
In order to respond to high customer demands and the need for a faster delivery of high quality business critical features, the old school approach of deploying new features on a bi-monthly or quarterly basis are not suitable. Customers expect business critical features to be delivered faster, and with higher quality or else they will move on to another provider capable of delivering faster. Furthermore, large release cycles tend to be buggy, time consuming and unreliable.
The practice of CD is aimed at ensuring that code can be rapidly and safely deployed to a live production environment by delivering every change to a production-like environment along the delivery pipeline and ensuring that critical applications and services are working as expected through rigorous automated testing.
Finally, please note that CD is not just about automated build, test and release process. It`s also about committing fully to the practice of the process continuously. By that we mean all the developers in the team have to agree to commit their code regularly i.e. daily basis. It’s only CD, if all developers are continuously committing their code. So just the act of setting up the CD automation tools does not necessarily make your team a CD practitioner, your team needs to adhere to the CD practice regularly!
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