Kubernetes in the Enterprise

Chapter 5. Continuous Delivery

Entire books have been written about Continuous Delivery and DevOps in general. We are not going to repeat why Continuous Delivery is important. With that limited scope in mind, let’s review how container images and Kubernetes support the following DevOps principles:

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 what changes have been made and to identify the cause 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 early stages do not work correctly in production—which is the only place it matters.

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 integration of changes

All changes should be built and deployed together on an ongoing basis to identify when the intermingling of various changes leads to an unforeseen issue or application programming interface (API) incompatibility.

Highly automated testing with continuous ...