Continuous Deployment

Foreword

In the last couple of decades I believe that we, the software development industry, have made many significant advances, but perhaps the most important, because it is the most fundamental, is in our approach to the development process itself.

We have more firmly established the roots of our discipline: an engineering approach based on small, iterative, incremental steps, gathering feedback after each tiny step on the quality of our work. This is the process used by nearly all of the organizations that we think of as examples of excellence in software development these daysfrom SpaceX and Tesla to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix—as well as many many more in every field of software development from AAA games to medical devices. In addition to this empirical evidence for the success of this approach, we also have evidence from the most scientifically justifiable and longest-running research into the practice of software development undertaken so far: the DORA research, which predicts that with the adoption of the techniques of continuous delivery and continuous deployment, you will build better software faster.

This progress is built on a sequence of steps forward that the industry has taken, of which my work has been a part. It began with Kent Beck’s extreme programming and continuous integration and progressed through my work and others’ on the practices of continuous delivery and DevOps, but the logical conclusion of those steps is to take them all the way to production. ...