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Continuous Delivery: Anatomy of the Deployment Pipeline

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The deployment pipeline is the key pattern that enables continuous delivery. A deployment pipeline implementation provides visibility into the production readiness of your applications by giving feedback on every change to your system. It also enables team members to self-service deployments into their environments. Learn how to create and manage a deployment pipeline, and how to use the crucial information it provides on the bottlenecks in your software delivery process so you can work to continuously improve it.
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Continuous integration is an enormous step forward in productivity and quality for most projects that adopt it. It ensures that teams working together to create large and complex systems can do so with a higher level of confidence and control than is achievable without it. CI ensures that the code that we create, as a team, works by providing us with rapid feedback on any problems that we may introduce with the changes we commit. It is primarily focused on asserting that the code compiles successfully and passes a body of unit and acceptance tests. However, CI is not enough.

CI mainly focuses on development teams. The output of the CI system normally forms the input to the manual testing process and thence to the rest of the release process. Much of the waste in releasing software comes from the progress of software through testing and operations. For example, it is common to see

  • Build and operations teams waiting for documentation or fixes
  • Testers waiting for "good" builds of the software
  • Development teams receiving bug reports weeks after the team has moved on to new functionality
  • Discovering, towards the end of the development process, that the application's architecture will not support the system's nonfunctional requirements

This leads to software that is undeployable because it has taken so long to get it into a production-like environment, and buggy because the feedback cycle between the development team and the testing and operations team is so long.

There are various incremental improvements to the way software is delivered which will yield immediate benefits, such as teaching developers to write production-ready software, running CI on production-like systems, and instituting cross-functional teams. However, while practices like these will certainly improve matters, they still don't give you an insight into where the bottlenecks are in the delivery process or how to optimize for them.

The solution is to adopt a more holistic, end-to-end approach to delivering software. We have addressed the broader issues of configuration management and automating large swathes of our build, deploy, test, and release processes. We have taken this to the point where deploying our applications, even to production, is often done by a simple click of a button to select the build that we wish to deploy. This creates a powerful feedback loop: Since it's so simple to deploy your application to testing environments, your team gets rapid feedback on both the code and the deployment process. Since the deployment process (whether to a development machine or for final release) is automated, it gets run and therefore tested regularly, lowering the risk of a release and transferring knowledge of the deployment process to the development team.

What we end up with is (in lean parlance) a pull system. Testing teams deploy builds into testing environments themselves, at the push of a button. Operations can deploy builds into staging and production environments at the push of a button. Developers can see which builds have been through which stages in the release process, and what problems were found. Managers can watch such key metrics as cycle time, throughput, and code quality. As a result, everybody in the delivery process gets two things: access to the things they need when they need them, and visibility into the release process to improve feedback so that bottlenecks can be identified, optimized, and removed. This leads to a delivery process which is not only faster but also safer.

The implementation of end-to-end automation of our build, deploy, test, and release processes has had a number of knock-on effects, bringing some unexpected benefits. One such outcome is that over the course of many projects utilizing such techniques, we have identified much in common between the deployment pipeline systems that we have built. We believe that with the abstractions we have identified, some general patterns have, so far, fit all of the projects in which we have tried them. This understanding has allowed us to get fairly sophisticated build, test, and deployment systems up and running very quickly from the start of our projects. These end-to-end deployment pipeline systems have meant that we have experienced a degree of freedom and flexibility in our delivery projects that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. We are convinced that this approach has allowed us to create, test, and deploy complex systems of higher quality and at significantly lower cost and risk than we could otherwise have done.

This is what the deployment pipeline is for.

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