Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 13. Continuous Delivery and DevOps

As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, digital transformation is about finding a new way of working such that the organization can handle rapid changes with more effectiveness and less fatigue. The entire organization will be realigned to the purpose of delivering more value to customers, faster. Business and technology teams need to work together to complete the build-test-learn cycle end to end.

From a technology perspective, one of the key enablers over the past decade has been the cloud. Amazon launched the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform in 2006, making it possible to create a server in seconds just by clicking a button on a web management console. Faced with slow-moving internal IT, many organizations jumped on AWS as a way to move faster. But simply using AWS as a way to “get servers faster” was only a small part of the benefit—by applying automation and scripting, you could, for example, also create testing environments to remove bottlenecks or scale your infrastructure to handle Black Friday traffic spikes. Automation, of course, is at the heart of Agile engineering practices, and it is a key part of CD and DevOps culture, as we describe in this chapter. Together these technologies and techniques reinforce each other, delivering massive productivity and faster creation of business value. We examine each of these in turn in this chapter.

First let’s look at CD. This is the key enabler to change the software delivery process ...