Introducing Continuous Delivery and Software Supply Chain Security
Most transactions and interactions today are digital or rely on digital services, so the ability to deliver software quickly, reliably, and securely is a critical competitive advantage. Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering practice that enables teams to achieve this goal by automating the entire software release process, from committing code to deploying to production. CD, properly done, empowers organizations to reduce their time to market (TTM), improve software quality, and release new features and bug fixes more frequently.
The goal of this book is to share how to implement secure CD using Google Cloud services such as Cloud Code, Cloud Workstations, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Deploy, and others.
In this book, we describe each service and show how you can use them together to automate and secure your software delivery pipeline. But first, in this chapter, we introduce CD principles and some of the practices and technical capabilities that drive the ability to implement them.
This chapter also provides an overview of security threats that a software supply chain can face and some practices that can mitigate those threats.
This chapter includes the following sections:
- Introduction to CD
- Understanding continuous integration
- Understanding continuous testing
- Understanding deployment automation
- Securing your software delivery pipeline
We start this book by looking at what CD is.