Continuous Delivery in Java

Chapter 10. Deploying and Releasing from the Pipeline

With firm foundations in automating builds and continuously integrating code, we can now focus on the delivery of valuable software to various environments, including production. A key lesson that you will learn is that today’s business requirements and popular software architecture practices strongly encourage you to separate the processes of deployment (a technical activity, as you will see) and release (a business activity); in fact, we will talk about deploying an application, but releasing a feature. This has ramifications for the way you design, test, and continuously deliver software.

One aspect of software development that becomes critical after you start to consider different environments is configuration. The need to track different configuration values depending on the environment that you are using (development, test, pre-production, production...) isn’t new, but tracking all these has become much harder with the advent of cloud-based platforms, since you may not know a priori where your application might be running. On top of this, a continuous delivery process might require frequent changes in configuration, meaning configuration management has to be at the heart of your deployment and release strategies.

Deploying, releasing, and managing configuration are some of the most challenging aspects of continuous delivery, and there is a lot of ground to cover. To help you go through all of it, we have created the Extended ...