Understanding CI/CD: Evolution and Practices

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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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