What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Delivery is the ability 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.

The goal is to make deployments—whether of a large-scale distributed system, a complex production environment, an embedded system, or an app—predictable, routine affairs that can be performed on demand.

We achieve all this by ensuring our code is always in a deployable state, even in the face of teams of thousands of developers making changes on a daily basis. We thus completely eliminate the integration, testing and hardening phases that traditionally followed “dev complete”, as well as code freezes.

It is often assumed that if we want to deploy software more frequently, we must accept lower levels of stability and reliability in our systems. In fact, peer-reviewed research shows that this is not the case—high performance teams consistently deliver services faster and more reliably than their low performing competition. This is true even in highly regulated domains such as financial services and government. This capability provides an incredible competitive advantage for organisations that are willing to invest the effort to pursue it.

If this sounds good to be true, bear in mind: continuous delivery is not magic. It’s about continuous, daily improvement—the constant discipline of pursuing higher performance by following the heuristic “if it hurts, do it more often, and bring the pain forward.”