Preface
This is a book about continuous deployment: the practice of structuring your software pipeline so that it is completely free of manual intervention. With this methodology, every code commit that passes its quality gates is automatically deployed to production.
This topic brings to the surface an often debated tension in software engineering: getting to production quickly versus getting to production safely. On the surface, continuous deployment might look like the former, but on closer inspection, it really aligns with the latter. On even closer inspection, I would argue that we don’t have to choose.
In the past couple of decades, we have seen a number of practices showcasing how speed and reliability actually go hand in hand when it comes to delivering software. DevOps, eXtreme Programming (XP), continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD): these practices have demonstrated again and again how shorter iterations improve the stability of production systems, rather than hindering it. This is because shorter iterations reduce the size of changes in each release, foster communication across roles, encourage a culture of automation, and allow for early and continuous feedback. Overall, shorter iterations and frequent deployments improve software’s stability and quality.
I consider continuous deployment to be the natural next step in this line of thinking.
During my career as a software consultant, I was lucky enough to work with several companies that were already ...
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