White Paper

Advancing from continuous delivery to continuous deployment

How to enhance a CI/CD pipeline to deploy faster and get better results

Download white paper

Ship better features, faster

In today’s agile environment, competition is fierce. Time to market is critical. Enterprises need to adapt to new paradigms quickly. A steady stream of engaging new features is necessary to remain competitive. A robust, automatic, continuous deployment pipeline offers the power to deliver on all of this and more.

To transform from continuous delivery to deployment successfully, cultivate a solid execution plan with everyone from the development and management team on board. Set and review clear metrics mapped to the process. If results do not align with expectations, the team is notified and able to quickly remedy issues or revert to continuous delivery. As a result, the pipeline would still deliver on promises made to the businesses. Building and using the continuous deployment process generates cost-savings, a healthier working environment and products, higher scaling efficiency, and improved overall quality.

Continous deployment readiness checklist

Evaluate that you're ready to tackle continuous deployment using the below parameters as a baseline.

  • Assess that the application architecture and technology infrastructure are primed for automating production deployment with zero downtime.

  • Ensure the pipeline is highly reliable, the team has high confidence in the overall configuration, and establish a succession of quality gates all the way to the production environment.

  • Establish extensive monitoring of the production environment and implement comprehensive alert instrumentation. QA and DevOps team members must receive these alerts immediately to maintain maximum build and deployment momentum. A primary objective here is to avoid poor user experience and calls into customer support.

  • Set the application, environment, and project performance metrics. Then, track actual measures in real-time. The measurement and tracking regimen empowers the team to readily gain clear insight into the release status and verify a risk of an imminent blockage in the pipeline.

  • Before making any attempt to increase deployment frequency, confirm there is a decreasing or steady trend in the deployment failure rate. Continuing with more automation and sophistication is not advisable if the failure rate is high or unstable.