Software Continuous Deployment

What You Should Know About Continuous Deployment Software

DevOps emerged as the result of companies’ desire to shorten the software development lifecycle. The goal behind DevOps is to create a more responsive development, update, and upkeep strategy, as well as to keep development objectives in constant alignment with business ones. Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment were born to promote more agile strategies on the development side. The theory behind each are as follows:

• Continuous integration: Merging all your developers’ code into one central repository at regular intervals to avoid code conflicts
• Continuous delivery: Keeping code constantly ready for deployment without pushing it into production
• Continuous deployment: Automatically pushing code updates into production after successfully passing testing

Often, the term CI/CD is used to mean continuous integration/continuous delivery—ignoring continuous deployment—because the thought of automatic pushes into production is daunting for many businesses. It necessitates more rigorous testing to ensure nothing broken gets pushed into production, and the potential that bad code can go live feels off-putting for many teams. By implementing stronger prelaunch testing strategies, though, continuous deployment serves up a huge advantage in the form of faster software updates and more responsive upkeep, putting your business ahead of your competitors.

Key Benefits of Continuous Deployment Software

• Quicker end-user impact from added functionality, updates, and upkeep
• Time saved from eliminating manual deployment requirements
• Smoother transition from development to deployment

Why Use Continuous Deployment Software?

While continuous deployment can sound intimidating to a lot of companies, the strategy can be quite beneficial. Continuous deployment—in conjunction with continuous integration—creates a strong, fluid pipeline of unified code production, testing, and distribution. Instead of worrying about intermittent, large updates, companies can quickly crank out small changes to continuously improve their software.

Huge update deployments tend to be painful to release, hectic to track, and just plain difficult to sift through for both businesses and consumers. Continuous deployment strategies help relieve this pain. Small, incremental changes are easier to track (especially in conjunction with configuration management software tools), troubleshoot, and roll back in the event of a break. Incremental changes are also much faster to redeploy, which can save the headache of going through manual deployment over and over.

Fast feedback cycle — Because deployments occur automatically once functional testing is successful, businesses can get quicker feedback around ideas and changes made to their products. Users will have access to changes as soon as they’re ready, which helps businesses keep a consistent stream of feedback on their product. This helps companies build stronger products in the long run.

Competitive edge — Taking long spans between software updates or add-on releases leaves businesses vulnerable to being overtaken by more agile, responsive companies. With continuous deployment software, your business can keep updates and constructive changes flowing directly into the production environment, resulting in a stronger, more consistent product.

Who Uses Continuous Deployment Software?

It should be no surprise that development, specifically DevOps, teams are the primary users of continuous deployment tools. Software engineers and dev team leads both will get a lot of value from these tools, albeit for different reasons. Developers will have a much easier time launching changes directly into production environments with continuous deployment software, which saves them time. Team leads and managers will get a lot of use of the reports, metrics, and dashboards many of these solutions offer, as they provide higher-level insights as to progress the dev teams are making.

Continuous Deployment Software Features

The following are the most common features seen in continuous deployment solutions.

Repository connectivity — Continuous deployment solutions need access to code repositories to push successfully tested code into production. This software should have the capability to connect with any of your business’ code repositories, automatically turning successfully tested code into live product updates.

Automated deployment — This is the key distinguishing feature of continuous deployment software that separates it from other software types. Automated deployment allows companies to push small changes quickly into production, reducing the overall hassle of releasing updates and allowing your team to focus more on writing quality code.

Deployment tracking — Keeping track of automatic code deployments can help you understand exactly at which point certain shifts occur, like an increase in user errors or an increase in product use. Continuous deployment software should document each code push that gets sent to production, allowing you to see exactly how the new code performs. It can also show you if a build fails to push to production, which will alert developers to a potential issue in the code itself.

Reporting and metrics — At a higher level, continuous deployment tools should display push metadata, such as how many deployments are going out in a certain time span, what part of a software solution the deployments are targeting, and more. This feature is particularly useful for managers and team leads since reporting and metrics features can give them a top-down view of a dev team’s performance.

Additional Continuous Deployment Features

Deployment rollback — Hit a problem that testing didn’t catch? Some continuous deployment solutions have rollback capabilities, where live code can be restored to prerollout status. This lets development teams work out what went wrong, providing additional insights that can be used for improving predeployment testing.

Trends Related to Continuous Deployment Software

Continuous deployment is on the rise — Continually pushing small, incremental changes automatically into production is the new trend for software delivery. The modern agile workflow demands progress happen fluidly, quickly, and efficiently. That philosophy is difficult to keep up when everything needs to happen manually or every change or update gets scheduled out in advance. Continuous deployment keeps pace with your development teams and your customers, leaving a more in-touch vibe for everyone involved.

Shifts to DevOps assembly lines — The typical CI pipeline has not done well accounting for automation and continuous deployment. As more companies adopt broadscale DevOps methods, there’s going to be a shift from the standard CI pipeline toward a full DevOps assembly line that will account for the growing influence of continuous deployment and automation.

Potential Issues with Continuous Deployment Software

Pushing bad code — The fault of this issue lies less with the actual continuous deployment solution and more with a business’ testing practices and test automation. Bad code—code that causes errors, breaks, or crashes—should be caught during the testing process so that it doesn’t create problems in the production environment. If testing practices aren’t strong, though, continuous deployment solutions will end up pushing that bad code into production, which taints the user experience. If implementing a continuous deployment solution, be sure that your company has strong manual and automated tests to catch any possible bad code before it goes live.

Pushing too many visible changes — Companies, when using continuous deployment as part of their development process, should keep in mind the effect it may have on their user base if visible changes or updates keep appearing every few days or each week. While changes are welcome to currently existing issues, users might start getting concerned if they keep getting visual or functional changes at small increments. Consistency is key to both improving the learning curve and maintaining customer happiness, and when you mess with consistency too much or too often, you may risk upsetting users. Generally, you’re going to want to avoid doing too many noticeable changes too close together, unless you’re formally releasing information to update users about the whats and whys of your changes.

Software and Services Related to Continuous Deployment Software

Continuous integration — The most directly related software class, continuous integration tools and continuous deployment software work hand in hand. Continuous deployment picks up where continuous integration leaves off, passing small changes automatically into production after passing rigorous testing.

Build automation — Build automation tools are a less extensive version of continuous integration software. While they help developers build software and changes, they generally do not automatically prepare them to head to production. Changes built in build automation tools need to be pushed manually into testing and continuous deployment solutions.

Configuration management — Configuration management solutions help companies track changes that get made to software or applications. This is particularly useful in conjunction with continuous deployment solutions because they provide added visibility into the changes that are being automatically deployed into production.