Continuous Deployment in Action
The Difference Between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment
Before diving into continuous deployment, it’s important to understand the distinction between two closely related terms: continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Both are part of the broader practice of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), which helps software teams automate the process of delivering changes to production.
Continuous Delivery ensures that software is always in a deployable state. Every code change goes through automated tests, and if it passes, it is automatically prepared for release. However, the actual deployment to production still requires human intervention—someone needs to approve and initiate it.
Continuous Deployment takes this a step further. Every change that passes automated tests is automatically pushed to production, with no manual approval required. This means that new code reaches users faster, reducing the time between writing code and delivering value. Continuous deployment removes bottlenecks and allows teams to iterate quickly, responding to user feedback and fixing issues in real time.
Continuous Deployment gives your team more traction, like snow tires on an icy road.
What is Continuous Deployment?
Continuous deployment is the practice of automatically releasing every validated code change into production. In this workflow, as soon as a developer pushes code to the repository, it goes through automated testing and, if it passes, it is deployed immediately. This ensures a steady stream of improvements and bug fixes, making software development more dynamic and responsive.
For teams adopting continuous deployment, there are several benefits:
Faster release cycles: Developers don’t have to wait for scheduled releases; their changes go live as soon as they are ready. Read about how to measure and improve deployment frequency.
More reliable deployments: Because deployments happen frequently, each release is small, reducing the risk of major failures.
Better feedback loops: Teams can quickly see the impact of their changes and respond to user behavior or issues.
Less deployment stress: Since deployments happen continuously, there is no pressure around big, risky releases.
However, continuous deployment requires robust automation, strong testing practices, and reliable monitoring. Without these, automatic deployments can introduce significant risks.
How to Get Started with Continuous Deployment
Adopting continuous deployment doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s how teams can start implementing it in a structured way:
1. Strengthen Your Automated Testing Pipeline
Since every change is deployed automatically, strong testing is essential. Ensure your test suite covers:
Unit tests: Validate individual components.
Integration tests: Ensure different parts of the system work together.
End-to-end tests: Simulate real-world user interactions.
Performance and security tests: Identify potential slowdowns and vulnerabilities.
Teams should aim for high test coverage and reliable tests that catch real issues without generating too many false positives.
2. Set Up a Reliable CI/CD Pipeline
A good CI/CD pipeline automates the process of building, testing, and deploying applications. Tools like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD can help set up an automated workflow that pushes changes to production once they pass testing.
3. Implement Feature Flags
Feature flags allow you to enable or disable features without deploying new code. This helps control rollouts, test new features with a small subset of users, and quickly disable changes if something goes wrong.
4. Improve Monitoring and Observability
Since changes are deployed frequently, monitoring is critical to detect and resolve issues quickly. Key areas to monitor include:
Application performance: Track response times and error rates.
User behavior: Identify whether new changes positively impact user experience.
Infrastructure health: Ensure servers and services are running smoothly.
Tools like Prometheus, Datadog, and New Relic provide real-time insights into your application’s health. Check out our tips on how to monitor and measure recoverability.
5. Start Small and Expand
Instead of immediately deploying every code change, teams can start with a subset of changes, such as bug fixes, before expanding to new features. Gradually increasing the scope allows teams to build confidence and refine their process.
Easy Wins for Early Success
Teams new to continuous deployment can achieve some early wins by:
Automating testing and deployment for a small, low-risk project first.
Using canary releases to roll out changes to a small percentage of users before full deployment.
Improving rollback mechanisms to quickly revert bad changes.
Training developers to write deployment-friendly code, such as smaller, more frequent commits.
Caparra Can Help You Get There
Continuous deployment is a powerful practice that allows teams to move faster and deliver better software. While it requires investment in automation, testing, and monitoring, the benefits—faster releases, better feedback loops, and reduced deployment stress—make it a worthwhile goal.
If your team wants to ship code faster and with more confidence, consider adopting continuous deployment. Caparra can help you along the way: check out our free DevOps-focused chatbot, equipped with actionable, step-by-step advice on how to put DevOps tools and techniques in place for your software projects.
