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What is continuous deployment? It is a software development approach in which code changes are automatically deployed into production environments upon passing predetermined tests, using automation systems like Continuous Release Management to publish them without user interaction or approval.
When new updates pass these tests successfully, their distribution to users of software or products happens within minutes or days.
Businesses looking to broaden their apps and IT portfolio can reap numerous advantages from continuous deployment, starting with faster time to market by shortening the period between code development and consumer value, which often lasts days or weeks before an app reaches consumers.
Regression tests must be automated to reduce costly manual testing time. At the same time, organizations' systems for managing large bundles of production changes (e.g. release planning meetings or approval meetings) can often be redundant for most changes.
5 Steps To Successful Continuous Delivery
Establish A Continuous Learning Culture
Implement continuous learning strategies for optimizing work processes and decreasing waste to produce a CD of quality solutions:
- Enhance your knowledge and talents.
Carefully consider what capabilities exist within the AD organization, as this examination may reveal gaps in knowledge, skills, processes or practices that need to be filled to enhance efficiencies and productivity.
- Create communities of practice to accelerate organizational learning and provide essential opportunities for talent development.
Adopt methods and systems that foster ongoing education.
Develop Agile Fluency
Take crucial actions as you continue your CD journey:
- Create baseline metrics.
How do you know whether you're making progress toward your goal?
- Implement agile approaches.
How can you educate and teach yourself and your colleagues to start using agile methodologies? How do you know when you've mastered a skill sufficiently to advance to the next level?
Mature Agile Practices
Scrum, and Kanban alone cannot suffice when implementing agile processes and practices effectively. They serve different management purposes but do not assist developers with producing usable software products.
As your agile implementation matures, focus on two areas as you advance toward full maturity:
- Agile technical practices provide all the resources and direction necessary for quality assurance within applications while receiving continuous feedback on whether their system is ready for production deployment.
- Utilize componentized designs when creating new apps or updating legacy ones to confirm CD approaches.
Refactor legacy apps to benefit fully from agile and the principles required of CD.
Automate Infrastructure
Teams working across development, security data management, infrastructure, and operations (I&O) are increasingly under pressure to continuous Integration and deployment (CI/CD) solutions more quickly.
Gone are the days when someone would configure an environment in weeks or even months - now, agile values and practices help teams increase the frequency of app updates. In contrast, it helps these efforts manage this process more smoothly than ever. Specifically, Successful teams must:
- Provide and configure tools to assist development and I&O teams with managing and supporting new architecture.
- Implementation and management are integral parts of application deployment and upkeep.
You should keep multiple questions in mind during implementation and management: should containers be utilized, how should their management be approached, should we migrate our applications/databases into the cloud etc?
- Protecting applications and data is among the primary responsibilities of security professionals.
Rapid change and cloud migration of applications and data make protecting mission-critical assets even more complicated.
- Keep tabs on applications.
With oriented lean and agile approaches becoming more prominent, application performance monitoring has become more essential to provide timely quantitative feedback about how well a release was received by end-users and quickly identify any changes in performance or availability caused by more frequent production updates.
Data must also be readily accessible to triage potential issues due to regular production updates.
Improve Delivery Cadence
At this stage, technical experts must carefully consider various complex topics. To be successful with such tasks, however, mature agile development and practices will need to be used:
- Adopt an Enterprise Agile Framework: Enterprise agile frameworks provide a means to manage complex agile releases and update solutions efficiently and sustainably, providing routine and sustainable management processes for any waivers or modifications made during any agile cycle.
- Microservices architecture (MSA) concepts are being implemented.
MSA encompasses distributed apps that support agile development and scalable deployment on-premise and in the cloud; when correctly applied, it has an impactful way in which development teams create and distribute software.
Strategies For Continuous Deployment Success
The top seven strategies for continuous deployment are as follows:
Culture
Today's organizations must go beyond just having tools and technology to implement agile, continuous delivery and deployment successfully.
Most development shops must change their culture to adopt this methodology successfully; developers are no longer solely accountable for creating code; instead, they should assume full responsibility for the development, testing, automation tools, and ultimately adding operational capabilities into the pipeline to help facilitate the transition to production. It may take some effort for both development and operations teams to adopt such an approach if projects don't see success with it - failing, which may endanger both projects.
Automation Platform
Consider carefully which tool will best serve your continuous delivery pipeline since different tools on the market offer unique use cases.
If A/B testing is part of your plan, use a phased deployment based on test results, or if multiple updates need to be released within short intervals, you'll require something with release management features like pipeline visualization and support for cloud environments management.
App Architecture
Cloud-native applications use microservices and containers, which allows for independent and regular updates of each service.
A deployment pipeline typically comprises stages such as build, unit testing, integration testing (including functional tests), API testing, performance, staging and production; but now, with microservice architectures and improved deployment mechanisms, many customers are opting to test directly in production, although on a limited scale.
Each stage can also include the creation of dynamic cloud environments to facilitate provisioning, execution and decommission as part of an automated pipeline process.
To do this successfully, look for tools with built-in cloud plugins to make creating and destroying AWS, Google Cloud, and other cloud environments effortless.
Security
Security in today's environment of ever-increasing risks is critical. Yet, more than traditional security testing methods before pushing to production should be required.
Security should instead be embedded and automated as part of the CI/CD process and integrated within itself - for example, by automating code scanning, template checking and other security tests in pipeline stages by leading firms.
Insight
Visualizing and tracking pipelines, environment variables, test results, versions, bugs, and other artifacts helps developers and operations teams maintain an integrated view of a project throughout its lifecycle.
Collaboration and traceability thus increase.
Delivery Strategies
Test automation is critical for pipeline design and delivery. Production issues will arise without rigorous, high-quality automated tests in place before deployment; code coverage alone no longer serves as an indicator of code quality; cloud-native apps require linking test cases/suites directly with business needs/outcomes to guarantee test team approval before production goes live; when time constraints prevent this complete approach taking place immediately automate significant capabilities/flows first before considering cost/benefit aspects when automating additional tests.
Ensure that the data and environment used for testing and automation closely mirror those found in production environments.
Most pipelines include a "pre-production" step before sending software out for deployment in one go. However, before taking this route yourself, it might be prudent to build in stages across different AWS regions before doing so.
Monitoring And Feedback
Finally, constant input should come from all stages of development-QA-production- user experience, response times, the performance of critical business services, and technical metrics- which are crucial to ensure no degradation as release frequency increases.
Feedback must also be embedded into each stage of the pipeline so performance assessments and improvements can be assessed at earlier points and where costs can be less expensive.
Without question, continuous development and deployment processes offer significant advantages to users who require new capabilities on an ongoing basis without waiting months or years to see results from traditional development cycles.
By carefully considering these seven tactics for continuous deployment development and deployment processes, your projects could experience reduced application issues, reduced downtime costs and happier users.
Continuous Deployment Tools
Developers looking to produce high-quality software improvements must employ processes and technologies to consistently create and distribute software updates with excellent quality, as this guarantees communication between development and operations and decreases or eliminates errors from the software delivery pipeline.
Here are the best continuous deployment tools required in an ongoing deployment workflow:
- Version control helps with continuous integration by tracking updates to project assets.
Also referred to as revision or source control, versioning provides visibility over project updates and changes while allowing teams to collaborate regardless of time and place of work.
- Code review: "Code review" refers to testing current source code with tools to maintain software integrity by detecting faults or errors and helping developers address those problems before updating.
It serves the dual purpose of improving software integrity while aiding development teams with updating updates as soon as they become available.
- Continuous Integration (CI): Continuous integration is a core element of constant deployment that helps alleviate development bottlenecks when multiple developers collaborate on one project simultaneously.
Various proprietary and open-source CI technologies address various difficulties involved with business software deployments.
- Configuration management is the discipline and strategy behind maintaining consistent software and hardware configuration across servers, storage devices, networking connections and software programs.
All servers, storage devices and networking connections must be correctly set up with automated controls to maintain this consistency.
- Application release automation (or orchestration of application release) is critical to supporting continuous deployment.
Orchestration solutions tie processes together so developers complete all required steps before pushing new changes into production environments while closely working alongside configuration management processes.
Hence, project environments remain adequately equipped and are performing optimally.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: When adopting continuous deployment methodologies, monitoring environments that house your testing environments is vital to their successful functioning.
Infrastructure monitoring solutions allow users to examine application performance and assess any changes that have a positive or negative effect.
Conclusion
Implementing containerized delivery into microservices environments is integral for attaining agility, dependability and fast innovation.
CD's automation features and emphasis on streamlining deployment can significantly help in reaping its advantages in microservices ecosystems; to fully harness its benefits, you may adopt best practices such as modular design, automation and effective testing techniques - then take your software delivery efficiency even further by including CD in your microservices topology for increased efficiency and durability.
