This guide will help you introduce pipeline-based continuous delivery to your development project. Continuous integration & delivery is not only a flavor of the month — it’s an industry standard. If you want to catch up with the hottest IT trends, this guide is for you. Also, in case you are already familiar with the continuous approach.
Objectives of This Guide
With this guide you’ll be able to:
- Understand the concept of continuous delivery
- Understand the notion “delivery pipeline” and find out how to use it to automate your work
- Grasp best practices and analyze sample development workflow
Why Should You Care About Continuous Delivery
The term continuous delivery is still a bit confusing, the more it’s often replaced by the notion of continuous deployment and mentioned in the context of continuous development. All the phrases stem from the agile approach to development, where the cycle time is cut down as much as possible. Why? The faster the product moves to the next stage of the development process, the faster you receive feedback and will be able to deliver another, better version — see graphics below.
The advantages of shorter cycle time, when every change in the code becomes a deployment, are obvious and include:
- Delivering new features faster
- Receiving feedback in an instant
- Improving quality
- Reducing the risk of unsuccessful implementation of the change
- Saving time required to perform tasks manually
To benefit from continuous approach to development, you have to automate your work as much as possible. However, the implementation of the CD processes can be time and resource-consuming. In the next part of this guide we are going to show you how to easily implement the automated continuous approach in large and small projects using Buddy and its pipelines.