Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes

Chapter 5. Continuous Delivery Across Clusters

Cloud native applications have the potential to disrupt entire industries. A key reason for this is their ability to support continuous delivery. When the market environment changes and applications need to be updated to address real-world constraints that pop up quickly, continuous delivery enables applications to quickly adapt to meet these newly encountered issues. Here is a brief overview of how container images, Kubernetes, and OpenShift support DevOps principles to facilitate continuous delivery:

Small batch changes

All changes should be incremental and finite. When failures occur, small batch changes are typically easier to recover than large, disruptive changes.

Source control all the things

A history of all changes is helpful to understand the changes that have been made and to identify the causes of regressions in the code base or configuration.

Production-like environments

Developers should have access to environments and tools that are representative of production. Production environments typically operate at larger scales than development or quality assurance (QA) and with more complex configuration. The variance can mean that features that work fine in the early stages do not work correctly in production, which is the only place they matter.

Shift-left of operational practices

We should expose behaviors for health management, log collection, change management, and so on earlier in the development process.

Continuous ...