Continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment: What should be the default?
May 30, 2024
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Valentina and Ken discuss continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment, emphasizing the importance of safely implementing changes. They explore the benefits of feature flags, manual vs. automated deployment, and contextual considerations. The podcast compares cognitive load, test coverage, security, and team collaboration in different scenarios.
Continuous delivery focuses on readiness for deployment, while continuous deployment enforces actual deployment for each commit.
Continuous integration is crucial for consistent code integration and automated testing, paving the way for continuous delivery and deployment.
Deep dives
Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment: Understanding the Differences
Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are key concepts discussed in the podcast, examining the nuances between the two practices. Continuous delivery involves safely and quickly introducing all types of changes, including features, configurations, and bug fixes, to production or users in a sustainable manner. It emphasizes the importance of getting changes into the hands of users while ensuring the readiness of the software for deployment. Continuous deployment, on the other hand, takes this a step further by requiring that every change passing quality gates is automatically deployed to production. This distinction highlights that continuous delivery focuses on readiness for deployment, while continuous deployment enforces actual deployment for each commit.
The Role of Continuous Integration in Software Development
Continuous integration is discussed as a foundational aspect of software development preceding continuous delivery and deployment. It revolves around the continuous integration of code changes, emphasizing the importance of automated testing and frequent integration to detect issues early. The practice aims to provide constant feedback on the status of the code and its compatibility with other changes. Continuous integration sets the groundwork for subsequent stages such as continuous delivery and deployment, ensuring that code changes are integrated and tested consistently throughout the development process.
Challenges and Benefits of Continuous Deployment
The podcast delves into the challenges and benefits associated with continuous deployment, particularly in complex distributed systems. Removing the manual deployment step and shifting to continuous deployment can introduce complexities, such as handling simultaneous deployments of interdependent components. Teams may face issues with staging environments becoming less useful and needing to redefine workflow phases. Despite these challenges, continuous deployment offers significant benefits, such as faster feedback, reduced cognitive load, and improved resiliency in code changes, fostering a culture of quality and consistency in deployment practices.
Navigating the Transition to Continuous Practices: Recommendations for Startups and Established Businesses
The podcast provides guidance on adopting continuous practices based on the context of startups and established businesses. For upcoming startups, the recommendation leans towards embracing continuous deployment for cloud-based applications, emphasizing the importance of automation and rapid feedback. Conversely, for established businesses with legacy systems, the focus shifts to strengthening continuous integration practices before progressing to continuous delivery and deployment. The path to continuous practices involves incremental improvements, fostering a culture of testing, automation, and faster delivery cycles to drive efficiency and quality in software development.
Despite occasional confusion, the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is simple: should deploying to production be on demand or every good build? Answering which approach is 'best' is difficult; any attempt at dogmatism is likely to just look foolish, given it is, like many other debates in software development, context-dependent. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and unpick the issues at the heart of the discussion. It's all well and good saying the debate is context-dependent, but what does that actually mean in practice?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ken Mugrage and Valentina Servile debate the merits of both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Talking with hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Birgitta Böckeler, they offer their perspectives on when and where both should be used — in making the case for their chosen approaches, they shed some much needed light on a discussion that every software engineering team should have.
Learn more about Valentina Servile's book Continuous Deployment: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/continuous-deployment
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