What is Continuous Deployment?

Why Continuous Deployment Shows Software Maturity

Until now, software deployment has come with a lot of pain points. The most troublesome of these pain points include stability, scalability, security and compliance, agility, innovation, resourcing, deep expertise. Let’s take a closer look.

When deploying code to production, even the smallest mistake in preparation or execution can have big consequences. For context, updates cause ~80+% of outages. These outages create unplanned work that slows the process, impedes innovation, and has a high financial cost.

This is true for teams of all sizes but the larger your team and the more complex the apps you’re deploying are, the more complex the process becomes. When you have hundreds or thousands of members across disparate teams – as is often the case as software development has historically been a different skill than scaling and maintaining stability – there is a lack of end-to-end ownership that leads to quality problems, slower deployments, and reduced innovation. In short, across all of the most pressing issues, the manual nature of software deployment is at the root of the problem.

What Problems Does Continuous Deployment Solve?

Let’s break it down, issue by issue.

• Stability & Scalability: Automated controls replace manual checks and steps to drive more consistency and reliability. Automated Canary Analysis leverages observability data and statistical analysis to assure the expected load and performance. Progressive deployment strategies like Blue/Green, and Canary, allow minimal impact and easy rollback to known working versions.

• Security & Compliance: Automate creating and enforcing policies that govern your software and infrastructure deployment so you can deploy to production knowing you are compliant. When it’s audit time, your history and policies can tell your story: Operational policies to ensure best practices, security policies to secure resources and data, regulatory policies to meet requirements, and business policies to optimize for cost and performance.

• Agility & Innovation: Standardize your deployment processes, and have the flexibility to leverage multiple progressive strategies across teams. When your deployment is no longer manual, you have more reliability, insight, and confidence in your deployments. That means you can deploy small changes more frequently, reduce risk, observe the health and state of all your services and deployments; and pinpoint issues and roll back (or leverage automated rollbacks!) if and when needed.

• Resources & Deep Expertise: Instead of spending valuable time building homegrown solutions that stitch together disparate tools with brittle scripts riddled with error-prone deployments, let Armory help. Deploying software is Armory’s focus and expertise. Armory brings proven experience and products to enable repeatable, reliable, safe, and secure deployments to your organization. Instead of investing your resources into the cost of maintaining homegrown tools, you can focus on writing great code and innovation.

Why Choose Continuous Deployment?

Continuous Deployment lets you take the final step toward software development maturity and leave legacy practices in the dust. Reduce the workload on development teams so they can spend their time executing on application improvements. Manual deployments are the way of the past; Continuous Deployment is the future.