Continuous Delivery Sounds Great, but Will It Work Here?

Continuous delivery is a set of principles, patterns, and practices designed to make deployments—whether of a large-scale distributed system, a complex production environment, an embedded system, or a mobile app—predictable, routine affairs that can be performed on demand at any time. This article introduces continuous delivery, presents both common objections and actual obstacles to implementing it, and describes how to overcome them using real-life examples.

The object of continuous delivery is to be able to get changes of all types—including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.