Continuous Deployment

Chapter 1. Continuous Deployment

For as long as software engineering has been a discipline, a great deal of care and attention have been given to application code and its architecture. All manner of paradigms, programming languages, and architectural patterns have originated to ensure that code is both well-organized in developers’ editors and running efficiently later in production. It took more than half a century to collectively realize that we hadn’t given enough thought to what happens in between.

Deploying Every Few Months or Years

Before the early 2000s, the average software product’s path to production was an error-prone and clunky journey full of repetitive manual tasks. On this journey, changes from individual contributors were often integrated with delays, artifacts were built by hand, configurations and dependencies were tweaked outside of version control, poorly documented deployment steps were executed in meticulous sequences…and let’s not forget testing, which was performed painstakingly by hand for every new version. As a result, release life cycles could span months or even years. Figure 1-1 is a fact-based depiction of those times.

Figure 1-1. The typical path to production before the early 2000s

Such a lengthy path to production meant that all the up-front engineering investment in software design would not pay off until much later. Often, by the time new ...