#214 - Beyond CI/CD: Continuous Deployment Explained - Valentina Servile
Tech Lead Journal
The Importance of Questions and Continuous Deployment Insights
This chapter highlights the importance of asking questions to foster discussions in a team setting, particularly from a beginner's perspective. It also introduces the author's book on continuous deployment, which aims to fill the knowledge gap for junior team members and promote better communication and sharing of resources.
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Stop fearing Friday and late-night deployments!
Discover how the most painful part of software development—deploying to production—can become routine, safe, and even boring.
In this episode, I sit down with Valentina Servile (ThoughtWorks lead developer and author of “Continuous Deployment”) to discuss the principles, practices, and mindset shift required to achieve true Continuous Deployment.
Key topics discussed:
- The key differences between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment
- Why “if it hurts, do it more often” is the secret to safer, faster releases
- Applying Lean principles like one-piece flow and reducing batch size for higher quality and speed
- The importance of removing the final manual deployment gate and automating everything
- Essential minimum practices: robust automated testing, feature flags, static analysis, and zero-downtime deployments
- Separating deployment from release with feature flags and expand/contract patterns
- Overcoming challenges in regulated industries, technical hurdles, and third-party integrations
- The critical mindset shift: treating production as a first-class citizen and embracing “shift left” for quality and security
- Cautions and advice on using AI tools in a continuous deployment workflow
Tune in to level up your software delivery and learn how to make deployments so routine that you’ll never dread another release.
Timestamps:
- (02:00) Career Turning Points
- (06:05) Tips for Juniors Starting Their Careers
- (08:00) Continuous Deployment Book
- (10:16) Definitions of CI, CD, Continuous Deployment
- (15:42) If It Hurts, Do It More Often
- (19:18) Why Remove The Final Manual Gate to Production
- (24:56) Common Challenges in Adopting Continuous Deployment
- (30:02) Minimum Practices for Continuous Deployment
- (35:17) Hiding Work-in-Progress
- (38:46) The Difference Between Deployment vs Release
- (41:40) Slicing the Work
- (45:10) Coordinating Changes Between Systems & Third Parties
- (47:58) The Importance of Backward Compatibility
- (50:05) The Required Mindset Shift
- (53:16) AI Caution in Continuous Deployment
- (55:35) 3 Tech Lead Wisdom
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Valentina Servile’s Bio
Valentina Servile is a full-stack software craftswoman and Lead Software Developer at Thoughtworks.
She has worked with over a dozen companies in 5 different countries, ranging from start-up to enterprise scale. Her work has been focused on clean code, distributed systems and microservices, CI/CD practices, and evolutionary architectures in a variety of tech stacks. As a technical lead, she also coordinates delivery, and ensures a shared vision around ways of working and technical health in her cross-functional teams.
Valentina is passionate about creating an engineering baseline of clean code, testing and automation as the the most fundamental enabler of Agile, Lean and DevOps principles.
Follow Valentina:
- LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/valentina-servile
- Bluesky – @valentinaservile.bsky.social
- 📚 Continuous Deployment – https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/continuous-deployment/9781098146719/
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