97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 34. Improving Repeatability and Auditability with Continuous Delivery

Billy Korando

Handcrafting is valued because of the time and effort involved and small imperfections that give character and uniqueness. While these qualities might be valued in food, furniture, or art, when it comes to delivering code, these qualities are serious impediments to an organization’s success.

Humans are not well suited to performing repetitive tasks. No matter how detail-oriented a person might be, mistakes happen when performing the series of complex steps required to deploy an application. A step might be skipped, run in the wrong environment, or otherwise performed incorrectly, leading to a deployment failure.

When deployment failures happen, a considerable amount of time can be spent investigating what went wrong. This investigative process is hindered as manual processes often lack a central point of control and can be opaque. When a root cause is determined, the typical resolution is to add more layers of control to prevent the problem from happening again, but this usually only succeeds in making the deployment process more complicated and painful!

Organizations struggling to deliver code is not news, so to address this, organizations have begun to migrate to continuous delivery (CD). CD is an approach of automating the steps of delivering code to production. From the time when a ...