What is continuous delivery?
Here, you'll follow the Tailspin team as they discuss how a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline can help them with their upcoming release.
The Tailspin team is starting to feel better about their build process. They have an automated process running on Azure Pipelines, which means the build environment is stable. Amita knows immediately when she needs to test an artifact. She finds fewer bugs because Andy and Mara have started to add unit tests and code quality tests. Life is looking good. Let's check in with the team.
Morning meeting
The team is in the meeting room waiting for Irwin, the product manager, who wants to talk to them. They look forward to telling him about their progress. But when Irwin walks in, he doesn't look happy. He starts talking right away.
Irwin: I had a meeting this morning with the management team. They want to know why we're taking so long to release our games and websites. Our closest competitors get new features and new games out there much faster than we do. We need to speed up things. I'm not alerting just you. I'm alerting all the teams. What can we do to help your team deploy faster?
Andy: This is a little sudden, but we're a bit ahead of you. We've been automating how we build our websites. Maybe now it's time to extend our automation to our release process.
Irwin: How would you do that?
Mara: We created an automated build pipeline by using Azure Pipelines. It builds an artifact that Amita can test. We could also build a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline.
Irwin: What's a CD pipeline?
Mara begins to explain, but is interrupted when Irwin's cell phone beeps. Irwin reads a text message and mutters under his breath.
Irwin: I'm sorry, but this is urgent. I have to go. Why don't you all figure out this CD business and get back to me soon?
Andy looks around at his team.
Andy: Coffee?
Andy and the rest of the team head to the coffee shop to create a plan.
What is continuous delivery?
The team is meeting over coffee to figure how to set up a continuous delivery workflow.
Andy: Mara, can you tell us what you know about continuous delivery?
Mara: To me, CD and DevOps are inseparable. Remember that we defined DevOps as the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.
CD by itself is a set of processes, tools, and techniques that enable rapid, reliable, and continuous delivery of software. So CD isn't only about setting up a pipeline, although that part is important. CD is about setting up a working environment where:
- We have a reliable and repeatable process for releasing and deploying software.
- We automate as much as possible.
- We don't put off doing something that's difficult or painful; instead, we do it more often so that we figure out how to make it routine.
- We keep everything in source control.
- We all agree that done means released.
- We build quality into the process. Quality is never an afterthought.
- We're all responsible for the release process. We no longer work in silos.
- We always try to improve.
We've already put many of these ideas into place, and we all agree they've improved how we work. CD is an extension of what we've already started.
Why do I need continuous delivery?
CD helps software teams deliver reliable software updates to their customers at a rapid cadence. CD also helps ensure that both customers and stakeholders have the latest features and fixes quickly.
Let's continue to listen in on the team as they talk this out.
Andy: Thanks, Mara. We need CD because, as we all know, the world has changed. New features are being released faster. Updates and bug fixes need to be available right away. It isn't just our management that wants to speed up our releases. Management is simply reacting to the demands of our customers. If customers can't get what they want from us, they'll go somewhere else.
Tim: Agreed! I can't wait to get started.
Andy: Thanks, everyone. I'm going to propose that Mara and I put together a simple proof of concept (POC). I think everything will be a lot easier to understand if you can see a CD pipeline in action.
Amita: Good luck, you two.
The team leaves Andy and Mara to work out the details.
How does continuous delivery compare to right-click publishing?
Many development tools provide ways to publish your application directly to some target environment, such as Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) or Azure. For example, you can Publish an ASP.NET Core app to Azure by using Visual Studio. This process is sometimes called right-click publishing.
Right-click publishing is a great way to quickly build a prototype. For example, you might right-click publish your application to Azure so that you can share a new idea with your team. However, this technique has limitations.
Continuous delivery provides a consistent way for you and your team to continuously test, deploy, and monitor your application each time you check in your code. When you right-click publish your application, there's no guarantee that the code was properly tested, or will behave as expected under real-world usage.
In this short video, Abel Wang, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, explains more.
How does continuous delivery compare to continuous deployment?
In the DevOps community, you might hear the terms continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Do these terms mean the same thing? In this short video, Abel explains the difference.
What continuous delivery tools can I use?
After the meeting ends, Andy and Mara plan the next steps. They use Azure Pipelines to build their software. They want to consider what tools, including Azure Pipelines, are available to help them with their release process.
Mara: Where do you want to start?
Andy: First, we need to agree on our release-management tool. Let's make sure the tool we choose:
- Supports our version control system.
- Can deploy to multiple environments so that we can test and validate our work.
- Makes it easy to define our deployment tasks.
- Is easy to extend.
Mara: Azure DevOps integrates with several other continuous integration (CI) and CD solutions. Many solutions are out there, and we're not invested in any of them. If we were, it would make sense to use that one. Popular CI and CD systems include Jenkins, Circle CI, GitLab, Travis CI, and Azure Pipelines.
These tools have similarities, but each of them also has particular strengths. Some of these tools are open source, some are free, and some you have to pay for. They also provide built-in integrations with other software tools.
For example, Jenkins is open source. It has many plug-ins, and many companies use it. You can run Circle CI in the cloud or on-premises. I think we'd need to customize it. GitLab is a single application for the entire software development life cycle. It might be bigger than we want right now. We can keep using Azure Pipelines.
Here's a short video where Abel talks about using DevOps best practices to deploy code to Azure.
Mara: My vote is to stay with Azure Pipelines.
Andy: I agree. Azure Pipelines has worked great for us so far, and we don't have to learn another new technology.
Mara: Great. Let's get started on the pipeline details.
Andy and Mara move to a conference room to plan their CD pipeline.