What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development practice where code changes are automatically prepared for a release to production. It ensures that applications can be deployed at any time, quickly and safely.
How Does Continuous Delivery Work?
After code passes automated tests during Continuous Integration (CI), it moves to staging environments where further tests (like performance and security tests) are automatically executed. If everything passes, the release is ready with a single manual approval or even automatic deployment.
What Are the Benefits of Continuous Delivery?
- Faster release of new features and bug fixes.
- Higher confidence in releases due to rigorous automated testing.
- Reduces manual intervention and human errors.
- Enhances agility and responsiveness to market changes.
How Can Continuous Delivery Reduce Mean Time to Resolution?
Because deployments happen frequently and are small, it’s much easier to identify, rollback, and fix problematic changes quickly, minimizing production incidents.
What are the Challenges of Continuous Delivery?
- Requires a high level of test automation.
- Demands cultural change toward DevOps collaboration.
- Complex to implement across legacy systems.
Leading Tools – of Continuous Delivery
These tools enable teams to automate the delivery of code changes to testing and production environments quickly, safely, and repeatedly:
- Spinnaker – A powerful multi-cloud continuous delivery platform with advanced deployment strategies like canary and blue-green.
- GitLab CI/CD – Offers integrated build, test, and delivery pipelines with robust automation and environment control.
- AWS CodeDeploy – Automates application deployments to Amazon EC2, Lambda, and on-premises servers with rollback support.
- Argo CD – A declarative GitOps-based continuous delivery tool built for Kubernetes environments.
LOCI – Strengthens continuous delivery pipelines by analyzing compiled artifacts before deployment, uncovering software defects and runtime risks that traditional tools often miss.
