Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

• Continuous Delivery does not mean every commit is deployed to production after passing automated tests
• The point of Continuous Delivery is to ensure every change is ready to go to production
• Before production delivery, manual steps to authorize and audit can be required
  • decision can be made by a person, and executed by tools
• Continuous Delivery makes go-live a Business decision, not a Technical one
  • technical validation happens on every commit

Rolling Out a Change to Production

• Rolling out a change to production is not a disruptive event
• Deployment doesn't stop normal development activities
• Developers can keep working on the next set of changes
  • No Project Plan
  • No Handover Documentation
  • No Maintenance Window
• Deployment becomes a repeatable process
  • carried out and proven multiple times in testing environments

Benefits of Continuous Delivery

• Benefits the development team by automating the software release process
• Improves developer productivity
• Improves code quality
• Deliver updates to customers faster

Automate the Software Release Process

• method to checkin code that is:
  • automatically built
  • tested
  • prepared for release to production
• Ensures software delivery is:
  • efficient, resilient, rapid and secure

Improve Developer Productivity

• Frees developers from manual tasks
• Untangles complex dependencies
• Lets developers focus on delivering new software features
  • less time spent integrating code with other parts of the business
  • less time spent figuring out how to deploy their code
  • more time for coding logic that delivers needed features

Improve Code Quality

• Discover and fix bugs early in development process
• Additional testing easy to perform due to automation
• Testing more frequently means teams can iterate faster with faster feedback
• Allows quality code with assurance of stability and security
• Immediate feedback on on any breaking changes or bugs
  • mistakes found early in development process are easiest to fix

Deliver Updates Faster

• Deliver updates to customers quickly and more frequently
• velocity of entire team increased
  • includes release of features and bug fixes
• Business can respond faster to events:
  • market changes
  • security issues
  • customer needs
  • cost pressures
• For example, Security features can be introduced quickly and reliably with high confidence
  • automated testing increases confidence