August | 2018 | Technology Conversations

Continuous Deployment is about making a decision to do things right. It is a clear goal and a proof that the changes across all levels were successful. The primary obstacle is thinking that we can get there without drastic changes in the application’s architecture, processes, and culture. Tools are the least of our problems.

I spend a significant chunk of my time helping companies improve their systems. The most challenging part of my job is going back home after an engagement knowing that the next time I visit the same company, I will discover that there was no significant improvement. I cannot say that is not partly my fault. It certainly is. I might not be very good at what I do. Or maybe I am not good at conveying the right message. Maybe my advice was wrong. There can be many reasons for those failures, and I do admit that they are probably mostly my fault. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that my failures are caused by something else. I think that the root cause is in false expectations.
Continue reading →

Let’s paint a high-level picture of the continuous delivery pipeline. To be more precise, we’ll draw a diagram instead of painting anything. But, before we dive into a continuous delivery diagram, we’ll refresh our memory with the one we used before for describing continuous deployment.

The continuous deployment pipeline contains all the steps from pushing a commit to deploying and testing a release in production.

Continuous delivery removes one of the stages from the continuous deployment pipeline. We do NOT want to deploy a new release automatically. Instead, we want humans to decide whether a release should be upgraded in production. If it should, we need to decide when will that happen. Those (human) decisions are, in our case, happening as Git operations. We’ll comment on them soon. For now, the important note is that the deploy stage is now removed from pipelines residing in application repositories.
Continue reading →