Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
According to Neal Ford, continuous delivery adopts "Bring the pain forward," tackling tough tasks early, fostering automation and swift issue detection.
Continuous delivery treats the commonplace notion of a deployment pipeline as a lean Poka-Yoke: a set of validations through which a piece of software must pass on its way to release. Code is compiled if necessary and then packaged by a build server every time a change is committed to a source control repository, then tested by a number of different techniques (possibly including manual testing) before it can be marked as releasable.
Developers used to a long cycle time may need to change their mindset when working in a CD environment. Any code commit may be released to customers at any point. Patterns such as feature toggles can be very useful for committing code early which is not yet ready for use by end users. Using NoSQL can eliminate the step of data migrations and schema changes, often manual steps or exceptions to a continuous delivery workflow. Other useful techniques for developing code in isolation such as code branching are not obsolete in a CD world, but must be adapted to fit the principles of CD - for example, running multiple long-lived code branches can prove impractical, as a releasable artifact must be built early in the CD process from a single code branch if it is to pass through all phases of the pipeline.
Continuous delivery is enabled through the deployment pipeline. The purpose of the deployment pipeline has three components: visibility, feedback, and continually deploy.
According to Yan Cui, when it comes to serverless environments, ephemeral resources should be kept together and have their own deployment pipeline to achieve a high cohesion. However, shared resources that have a long spin-up time and landing zone should have their own separate repository, deployment pipeline and stack.
Continuous delivery takes automation from source control all the way through production. There are various tools that help accomplish all or part of this process. These tools are part of the deployment pipeline which includes continuous delivery. The types of tools that execute various parts of the process include: continuous integration, application release automation, build automation, application lifecycle management.
To practice continuous delivery effectively, software applications have to meet a set of architecturally significant requirements (ASRs) such as deployability, modifiability, and testability. These ASRs require a high priority and cannot be traded off lightly.
Microservices are often used when architecting for continuous delivery. The use of Microservices can increase a software system's deployability and modifiability. The observed deployability improvements include: deployment independence, shorter deployment time, simpler deployment procedures, and zero downtime deployment. The observed modifiability improvements include: shorter cycle time for small incremental functional changes, easier technology selection changes, incremental quality attribute changes, and easier language and library upgrades.
The original CD book written by Jez Humble and David Farley (2010) popularized the term; however, since its creation the definition has continued to advance and now has a more developed meaning. Companies today are implementing these continuous delivery principles and best practices. The difference in domains, e.g. medical vs. web, is still significant and affects the implementation and usage. Well-known companies that have this approach include Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Paddy Power and Wells Fargo.
Several benefits of continuous delivery have been reported.
Obstacles have also been investigated.
Eight further adoption challenges were raised and elaborated on by Chen. These challenges are in the areas of organizational structure, processes, tools, infrastructure, legacy systems, architecting for continuous delivery, continuous testing of non-functional requirements, and test execution optimization.
Several strategies to overcome continuous delivery adoption challenges have been reported.
The following practices can enhance productivity of pipelines, especially in systems hosted in the cloud:
DevOps is a software engineering approach that centers around cultural change, specifically the collaboration of the various teams involved in software delivery (developers, operations, quality assurance, management, etc.), as well as automating the processes in software delivery.
Continuous deployment is a software engineering approach which uses automated software deployments. In it, software is produced in short cycles but through automated software deployments even to production rather than requiring a "click of a button" for that last step. Therefore, continuous deployment can be considered a more sophisticated form of automation. Academic literature differentiates between continuous delivery and continuous deployment according to deployment method; manual vs. automated.