Continuous Deployment

Chapter 5. Challenges

No new technology or practice is a silver bullet, and continuous deployment is no exception to this rule. In addition to requiring that the team be well-practiced in its implementation of continuous delivery, continuous deployment comes with its own set of challenges. It would be irresponsible of me not to mention these challenges in this book. Furthermore, I believe that understanding them provides a more well-rounded approach to continuous deployment itself. In case your team ends up facing these challenges, I will describe some strategies you can adopt to overcome them or mitigate them.

In this chapter, we will look at a variety of scenarios in which teams might struggle to adopt continuous deployment or require some tweaking to their processes or systems to make it work. You will learn about some of the pain points of the practice and the concrete implications that they have for real teams. Depending on the organization’s context, these pain points might be inconsequential, manageable, or completely unacceptable. It will be up to you to evaluate them and discuss their impact. You will have to ultimately decide whether you can mitigate them with the strategies described in this chapter, learn to live with them, or settle for not performing continuous deployment at all.

We will also look at systems in which the speed offered by continuous deployment might be inappropriate or even technically infeasible. However, such cases are the exception and not the ...