Continuous Deployment: What It Is and How It Works?

What Is Continuous Deployment?

What’s up, everyone? Have you heard of the term “continuous deployment” in software dev? It’s an approach where any code changes that pass all your tests are automatically deployed to production immediately.

Continuous deployment is an agile-inspired method. It is a software release process. The objective is to reduce the time taken for software to advance from initial coding to market launch. It promotes A/B testing and experimentation. The company aims to target customers with specific functionality.

The main goal is speed – you want to get new features and bug fixes out to your users quickly. Instead of doing big, manual deployment batches every few weeks, changes flow smoothly through your pipeline to be released daily or hourly.

A few key things you need – robust automated testing so quality code gets flagged early. Unit tests, integration tests, and security scans run fast on each change. Tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions automatically build, test, and deploy changes.

Deployment is automated via scripts that push the latest code to production servers seamlessly, without downtime. Ansible, Puppet, or Docker make it a breeze. Your app even auto-scales hosting resources on the fly.

Setting up takes some initial work, but it pays off big time. Bugs get squashed much faster, so users have a better experience. They instantly access new features rather than waiting weeks.

It’s the way to go over manual deployments for apps that update regularly. No more stressful all-nighters getting a release out! Just relax while your code flows through. Automation streamlines software delivery and keeps everyone happy in the end.

Continuous Deployment vs. Continuous Delivery 

Although they have similar roles in software development, delivery always comes before deployment. 

There must be a final physical approval process with continuous delivery before publishing the code in production.

Consider obtaining an item delivered to your home from an online store to grasp the distinction further. 

The delivery procedure is the step in which you coordinate the delivery of your goods. You can add your address and indicate when you want them delivered.

You will examine the package once it comes. You can begin utilizing it if satisfied, which is called deployment. If you are displeased with the product, you may reject it and return it. 

It is analogous to your code passing an automated test. This implies it returns to your developers rather than published to your clients so they may benefit immediately from the improvements.

As a result, continuous deployment represents the entire end-to-end development workflow. 

The primary distinction between continuous deployment and delivery is that releases in continuous deployment occur automatically if all release requirements are met during testing.

How Does Continuous Deployment Work?

The deployment and release processes remain separated by continuous deployment. It encourages design thinking and the flow of value by:

Customizing features for specific customers:

Separating deployment from release allows the company to target particular customers with specific functionality. And test the impact of the release before distributing the capability to all consumers.

Innovation, such as A/B Testing, is encouraged:

Design thinking approaches like A/B Testing necessitate the capacity to show various functionality to targeted users. Then, collect data that aids in creating optimal designs for user demands.

Small batch production:

Prior pipeline decisions, such as automated testing, deliver in small batches faster.

Delivering based on business needs: 

Enterprises may release on demand. It significantly enhances business agility when deployment and release get separated. Efforts are made to guarantee both are automated and low-risk. 

A release, for instance, can be in production ahead of a marketing target, allowing maximum business flexibility in maximizing all elements of value delivery.

List of Continuous Deployment Tools You Can Use 

Jenkins:

Let’s begin with Jenkins, the marketplace’s most prominent CI/CD tool. Jenkins bills itself as an open-source continual integration server with over 1000 plugins. It enables it to be customized for a wide range of use cases. 

Jenkins is an excellent choice if you are concerned about the expense of other solutions; also, it gets extensively utilized. Therefore, there are a variety of plugins and documentation available.

JetBrains TeamCity:

JetBrains’ TeamCity is the famous IDE developer’s continuous integration and deployment solution. It boasts a user-friendly design and a plethora of essential features.

A free “Professional Server Licence” with three build agents may be sufficient for small teams. Following that, business licenses start at $1,999.

Gitlab:

GitLab provides a complete solution for continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. All within a single UI that connects with their Git source control scheme.

GitLab’s pricing is also relatively competitive when compared to the competitors. You can self-host or use GitLab’s SaaS, with pricing ranging from free to $99.

What Are the Advantages of Continuous Deployment?

We’d share some of the biggest pros We’ve seen from it. For those who don’t know, it automates your deployment process, so code pushes directly to production whenever it passes all your tests.

• One huge plus is speed – you can quickly release changes, whether features or fixes. No more waiting weeks for a deployment window. This means so much for the user experience, especially on bug fixes. They benefit faster.

• It’s also way more efficient for developers. No more stressful all-nighters before a big release. Code just flows smoothly from the code commit to the user. You save tons of manual, laborious work each deployment.

• Bugs are squashed much more rapidly. Problems are found and solved before they impact people. Quality is higher overall since the code undergoes rigorous automated testing on every change.

• It encourages a focus on ongoing improvement rather than periodic releases. You can refine and optimize projects incrementally instead of massive overhauls.

• The deployment process becomes completely repeatable and traceable. You avoid human errors cropping up due to tiredness or oversight. Reliability is vastly increased.

• Your team can experiment and innovate freely without deployment bottlenecks holding things up. Development velocity skyrockets as a result.

Overall, continuous deployment creates a much more streamlined workflow. Everything from coding to fixing to releasing runs very smoothly. Both developers and users happily benefit in the end.

What Are the Best Practices for Continuous Deployment?

We’ve been playing around with some continuous deployment workflows lately and wanted to share a few best practices We’ve picked up.

• First off, automated testing is critical, as we discussed before. Ensure unit, integration, acceptance, and UI/UX tests are set up to run pre-deployment on all code changes. This ensures quality.

• Another big one is to deploy often – even multiple times per day. Keep each deployment small with one single change – this makes rollbacks easier if needed. And be prepared to roll back quickly!

• Have a well-defined process in place for approving changes and deploying to environments. Tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins can help. Speaking of environments, make sure you have separate dev, test, staging, and production for changes to bake before pushing live.

• Control your infrastructure/configurations as code in something like Terraform. This way, environments can be created/updated automatically as needed.

• Keep humans in the loop! While automating as much as possible, make sure real people are monitoring deployments, analyzing metrics, and providing feedback to the team.

• Development teams work on numerous pieces of code simultaneously that must be organized together. The goal is to create a cohesive output. The changed lines of code might quickly derail a build without a clean code repository.

• Teams must regularly commit to the baseline for the CD process to run well (multiple times a day if possible). Development teams can limit the number of conflicting changes and handle them swiftly at the source by committing regularly.

Ultimately, the goal is lead time from code change to production should be mere minutes, not days. Only through speedy deploys can teams reliably and safely release updates frequently.