Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. Infrastructure Delivery Lifecycle

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. This will be the 14th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on. If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

In the traditional waterfall model, a system is fully developed in a build phase, tested and deployed in a release phase, and then maintained in a run phase. The Continuous Delivery approach leverages automation, agile engineering, and DevOps principles and practices to condense these phases to develop and deliver changes incrementally more frequently and quickly.¹ Figure 14-1 illustrates the difference.

Figure 14-1. Traditional vs. Continuous Delivery System Lifecycles

There are a number of advantages of Continuous Delivery over the traditional model, which include:

• Testing each change thoroughly enough to release, one by one, means issues are discovered and fixed sooner, when they it’s simpler and cheaper to do so. A common failing of longer release cycles is that there is not ...