Preface

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a set of software engineering practices that enables teams to deliver software quickly and safely by automating the entire software release process through a deployment pipeline.

To build a continuous delivery pipeline, you typically need separate tools to perform the necessary tasks, including the following:

• Automate artifact builds and software tests
• Manage source code
• Store, secure, and distribute software artifacts
• Manage and automate deployment to different runtime environments

You can choose tools from different providers and different deployment or installation methods, and integrate them. Or you can use a set of managed services from the same cloud provider, reducing the setup, integration, and management effort, allowing you to focus on your code.

The goal of this book is to use hands-on exercises to show you how to build an end-to-end continuous delivery pipeline on Google Cloud using Google-managed services, covering not only how to get code from commit to production but also how you can optimize your inner development loop.

The book starts by introducing continuous delivery principles and best practices to implement them while protecting your artifacts from security threats. You’ll then learn how to use Skaffold, Cloud Code, Duet AI, and Cloud Workstations to help stay in the flow and optimize feedback loops while you code. You’ll experiment with automating your builds and tests and generating signed provenance for your artifacts using Cloud Build. You’ll understand how to store your software artifacts and assess their security posture using Artifact Registry. You’ll learn how to orchestrate deployments and promotions through different stages using Cloud Deploy, and release your software on GKE and Cloud Run. You’ll also see how to use Binary Authorization to protect these runtime environments. Furthermore, we'll show some examples of integrating these tools with other services you may have.

After you learn about each tool or service, following the hands-on examples, we’ll guide you through creating an end-to-end software delivery pipeline that represents a real production environment, with multiple actors involved, using all the aforementioned services together.

Lastly, we’ll provide some additional best practices, as well as insights into some possible future trends.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build a secure software delivery pipeline from development to production using Google Cloud’s managed services and best practices.