The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Continuous Deployment

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Programmers, Operations

Our latest code is in production.

If you use continuous integration, your team has removed most of the risk of releasing. Done correctly, continuous integration means your team is ready to release at any time. You’ve tested your code and exercised your deployment scripts.

One source of risk remains. If you don’t deploy your software to real production servers, it’s possible that your software won’t actually work in production. Differences in environment, traffic, and usage can all result in failures, even in the most carefully tested software.

Continuous deployment resolves this risk. It follows the same principle as continuous integration: by deploying small pieces frequently, you reduce the risk that a big change will cause problems, and you make it easy to find and fix problems when they do occur.

Although continuous deployment is a valuable practice for fluent Delivering teams, it’s optional. If your team is still developing their fluency, focus on the other practices first. Full adoption of continuous integration, including automated deployments to a test environment (which some people call “continuous delivery”), will give you nearly as much benefit.

How to Use Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment isn’t hard, but it has a lot of preconditions:

• Create a zero-friction, zero-downtime deploy script that automatically deploys your code.

• Use continuous integration to keep your code ready to release.

• Improve ...