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What Is Continuous Delivery?

The term “continuous delivery” was coined by Martin Fowler and is a software development paradigm that allows your team to deliver new features quickly and reliably by automating the software delivery process and removing manual, error-prone, and time-consuming deployment processes. Leveraging continuous delivery allows you to build upon the benefits of continuous integration by combining artifact creation, infrastructure provisioning, and app deployment into a single unit of work.

How does continuous delivery help me?

Do you like rapid deployments? By leveraging continuous delivery, you and your team can automate the boring and repetitive manual tasks normally involved with pushing changes to production. In turn, this gives you and your development team more time to spend on more important things.

Having an automated deployment system also makes it possible for multiple devs to work together on the same project by keeping the main code branch up-to-date and minimizing code conflicts.

What are the key elements of continuous delivery?

The goal of continuous delivery is the ability to rapidly introduce new features into the hands of users in a sustainable way. To that end, there are a few common elements that make up continuous delivery and its contribution to the SDLC.

  • Repeatable Reliable Processes — The ability to take manual lists of tasks and automate them with software tools and scripts for repeatability
  • Version Control —  A must-have for any serious project. Version control enables a team of developers to efficiently collaborate on a shared codebase. Git is the most widely used version control system and a great companion for CD.
  • Build in quality — In CD, quality is not an afterthought that is kicked to the QA team. Quality is baked into every step of the release pipeline.
  • Do the hardest parts first — Painful, time-consuming, or error-prone tasks compound over time. Painful tasks should be addressed as soon as possible to prevent a compounding loss of energy.
  • Everyone is responsible — The entire organization should be focused and incentivized to ensure the end-user deliverable is as high quality as possible. Product Managers should plan with attention to deployment and quality assurance. The Security team should be actively involved in the release process.

See how Armory makes continuous delivery solutions possible:

Spinnaker is the world’s most powerful continuous delivery platform, developed and open-sourced by Netflix and Google, and battle-tested in production by hundreds of the world’s leading enterprises. Armory can help you scale Spinnaker for enterprise websites.

Armory brings the power of Spinnaker to your organization, along with mission-critical feature extensions, enterprise-grade stability, and 24/7 expert support from the leading independent member of the open-source community. Learn how scalable continuous delivery solutions can help your company and sign up for a free demo.

GetYourGuide

“After adopting Spinnaker, we saw a substantial increase in deployment frequency, and support requests reduced to almost zero.”

– Alex Eftimie, Staff DevOps Engineer, Developer Enablement at GetYourGuide

Leading U.S. Bank

“Armory provided immediate value with technical expertise, enterprise-grade software, and connectivity to the broader continuous delivery community. We are seeing a significant increase in both frequency and volume of releases with Armory’s integration.”

– Head of Core Engineering & Enterprise Architecture, Leading U.S. Bank

Giphy

“For teams looking for enterprise level solutions and support [for Spinnaker], we highly recommend Armory, who we partnered with throughout our development process.”

-Bryant Rockoff, Site Reliability Engineer, Giphy