Continuous Delivery in Java

Preface

Why Did We Write This Book?

Both of us have been Java developers long enough to witness, and be part of, several shifts within our chosen profession. Java the language has evolved a long way since we both wrote our first lines of code: Java 1.4 gave us nonblocking I/O, Java 8 gave us streams and lambdas, Java 9 gave us modules, and Java 10 finally gave us local variable type inference. Deployment platforms have also evolved in leaps and bounds, and the emergence of cloud and containers has provided many opportunities and challenges. One thing has not changed, though, and that is the need to deliver value to end users and customers. We have needed to use all of our skills, tools, and practices as best as we could in order to make the delivery of software as effective (and fun) as possible. Perhaps even more importantly, we have needed to work with and lead our teams to share this responsibility.

With an ever-increasing range of “best practices” emerging around software development, architecture, and deployment platforms, there is one thing that developers can generally agree on: the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery add enormous value to the software delivery life cycle. With the increasing demands from customers on the speed and stability of delivery, you need a framework that provides fast feedback and enables the automation of both quality assurance and the deployment processes. However, the challenges for modern software developers are manyfold, ...