The Ultimate Guide to Continuous Deployment

Not every organization is the same when it comes to Continuous Deployment. But in our experience, Continuous Deployment usually consists of several main phases:

• Code, Build, Commit – These stages occur left of deployment in the software development lifecycle. This is where the value wrought by software engineers becomes the code that will be deployed to the world. 
• Testing – In good CD workflows, testing is built into the pipeline and automated. Successful code that passes all tests is automatically released to the next stage. 
• Staged/Approved – the code has passed all testing and is ready for deployment. In continuous delivery, this is a gated step that is handled manually. In continuous deployment, declarative deployments determine how approved code is handled automatically. 
• Deployment – Obviously the most important stage in continuous deployment is the deployment itself. It is automated, optimized, and always available. If the code has passed automated testing and is deployment ready, it will be deployed. 
• Operate/Monitor – while this step lives after deployment, it is still essential in the software lifecycle. Once the software is deployed, it must be managed and monitored to ensure it works as intended. This is also where rollbacks can occur if needed.

Let’s break down the problems that Continuous Deployment solves, issue by issue.

• Lack of Software Innovation Leads to Non-Competitive Products: By allowing for more frequent updates to be deployed into production, CD helps make it easier for development teams to introduce new features, experiment with different ideas, and make adjustments quickly based on customer feedback. With this increased agility, companies are able to rapidly iterate upon their existing products and services, introducing new features and updates to the market faster than ever before.
• Poor Software Quality Leads to Frustrated Customers: CD is also beneficial in that it helps reduce the amount of time spent troubleshooting errors and bugs. With more frequent deployments, any issues can be identified and addressed quickly, meaning fewer disruptions for customers. This reduces customer frustration while ensuring product quality and reliability
• No Development Agility Leads to Frustrated Teams: Software development teams are constantly asked to be more agile. But how can that be more agile in practice? 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.
• Unstable Software Leads to Frustrated Customers: No one likes flaky software. In CD, 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. 
• Minimized Scalability Leads to Lack of Business Growth: Organizations that strive for growth want to do so in a way that makes sense. Automating the deployment process means simplifying operations, accelerating time-to-market, and decreasing the risk of change failures that cause customer outages. CD can improve developer experience and your customer experience, faster, all leading to better scalability for your organization.
• Poor Security and Compliance Leads to Risk: 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.
• Lack of Optimization Leads to Increased Cloud Costs: During economic downturns, especially in technology, teams are expected to do more with less. That means consolidating tools, buckling down on waste, and perhaps even layoffs. Navigating a tight budget with fewer tools means investing in solutions and processes that bring your business value, fast. One way to bring fast value is to use CD to manage cloud costs. 
• No Deployment Expertise Slows Down Development: 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.

One of the best ways to demonstrably improve DORA metrics — the criteria used by DevOps teams to measure performance and determine whether their teams are low to elite performers —  is via implementing CD. The four DORA metrics are:

Every development team is concerned with writing great code. Those who manage and run development teams want to enable developers to create great software. The software development lifecycle, whether on a small team or in a large enterprise organization, can benefit from CD. 

How Can a Small Team Run Continuous Deployment?

When it comes to software development, continuous deployment can be a great benefit for small teams. This method of deployment allows you to quickly and automatically deploy changes to your system without having to manually execute a series of steps each time. 

• Identify Manual Tasks – Map out your manual tasks throughout the software development lifecycle. Then you can begin to add automation through tools like Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service to cut down on manual efforts. 
• Set-Up Automations – By utilizing automation, small teams are able to deploy their changes faster and with fewer errors, resulting in improved efficiency and productivity, all leading to increased developer satisfaction.

Engineers, DevOps pros, and even security and site reliability experts can all use and benefit from Continuous Deployment. 

What is Continuous Deployment for DevOps?

• DevOps is concerned with the enablement and satisfaction of developers so they can do what they do best: create great software. Continuous Deployment is an integral part of DevOps because it allows for frequent, automated releases. It enables developers to automatically deploy their software at any time without manual intervention and eliminates the need for developers to manually test changes each time they are made, freeing up valuable resources that can be better used elsewhere.
• Ultimately, CD helps DevOps teams reduce the time spent on delivery, giving them more time to focus on innovation and increasing developer satisfaction.

What is Continuous Deployment for Platform Engineers?

• Platform Engineers play an important role in setting up the infrastructure required for creating internal or external platforms at their organization. They manage the testing, staging and production environments and ensure that changes made to code meet security and quality standards. Additionally, they must design processes to monitor application performance as well as develop automated tools to ensure that the system remains stable and secure.
• By leveraging Continuous Deployment, Platform Engineers can help teams integrate with technology and processes throughout the development lifecycle, move faster, and stay ahead of their competition. 

What is Continuous Deployment for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)? 

• Continuous Deployment is an important strategy for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). It allows SRE teams to continuously deploy software updates in a safe, secure and reliable way. By automating the process of deploying new code or improvements to existing code, SREs can ensure that their systems remain up-to-date and running optimally.
• Continuous Deployment also minimizes the risk of errors that occur as a result of manual deployment processes and helps SREs keep up with the ever-changing demands of their systems and customers. The automation process ensures that each new release is tested before it goes live, so any issues can be quickly identified and fixed.

What is Continuous Deployment for DevSecOps?

• Extending from DevOps, especially at larger organizations, DevSecOps teams are able to use Continuous Deployment as part of their overall security strategy, allowing them to reduce the chances of a breach while still enabling rapid development cycles.

Learn about what 400 software leaders, developers, and engineers care about when it comes to software deployment in these joint Gartner and Armory reports.

Until recently 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, and 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, the more complex the deployment process becomes.

Automation is the Key

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.

Upwave improves code quality and consistently deploys to production in <20 minutes with Armory CD-as-a-Service. Learn more about how they’ve improved development maturity in this case study.

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 application improvements. Manual deployments are the way of the past; Continuous Deployment is the future.

The Future of Continuous Deployment

While Continuous Deployment has been around for some time now, there are still plenty of possibilities for improvement in the near future.

• More Automation – One of the most promising advancements on the horizon is automation. Currently, many continuous deployment processes require manual intervention, but with advanced automation tools, this could potentially be taken out of the equation. This would allow developers to deploy updates without any user involvement—even for complex releases that involve multiple stages and components. Not to mention the advancements in AI technologies that can and will be leveraged for Continuous Deployment.
• Improved Testing – Another development to keep an eye on is improved testing and validation. As Continuous Deployment evolves, more reliable methods of verifying that deployed code works as expected are being developed. For example, AI-powered tools can automatically verify the functionality of released code and even suggest improvements.
• Resource Optimization – There are other areas of improvement that will make Continuous Deployment even better. For example, tools that help manage infrastructure resources such as servers, databases, and storage are becoming increasingly advanced. This makes it easier to scale up resources in response to changing demand—a key component of continuous deployment.

These advances in automation and testing will make Continuous Deployment even more efficient in the future. With less manual intervention required by developers and more reliable testing, software deployments can be completed more quickly and with less risk. It’s an exciting time for continuous deployment—and it looks like the best is yet to come.

Learn more about Imperative to Declarative to Generative Continuous Deployment and The Future of Continuous Deployment in this blog.