Since the increase in popularity of continuous delivery (CD), there was an increase in the number of tools marketed as CD solutions. That’s normal. It is only natural for software vendors to ride the waves. They need to sell, and there’s nothing better to sell than whatever is popular at a given moment. Continuous delivery is one of those "popular" waves.

A video version of the same post is available in The DevOps Toolkit Series YouTube channel.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with buying tools that solve problems. You have a problem, a vendor has a solution, you buy it, they earn money, and you have a good return on investment. Everybody wins, except when the tool does not do what it’s supposed to do. That’s when we run into issues.

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Everyone wants to implement continuous delivery. After all, the benefits are too big to be ignored. Increase the speed of delivery, increase the quality, decrease the costs, free people to dedicate time on what brings value, and so on and so forth. Those improvements are like music to any decision maker. Especially if that person has a business background. If a tech geek can articulate the benefits continuous delivery brings to the table, when he asks a business representative for a budget, the response is almost always “Yes! Do it.”

A continuous delivery project will start. Tests will be written. Builds will be scripted. Deployments will be automated. Everything will be tied into an automated pipeline and triggered on every commit. Everyone will enter a state of nirvana as soon as all that is done. There will be a huge inauguration party with a vice president having the honor to be the first one to press the button that will deploy the first release to production. Isn’t that a glorious plan everyone should be proud of?
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