Overview of Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery was conceptualized by Jez Humble in 2012 with his revolutionary book on Continuous Delivery. The idea that Humble had when writing the book was to extend the concept of CI to support the delivery and automated testing apparatuses a software team would undertake prior to release. This concept radically changed the way software organizations looked at releasing software solutions to customers and aims to keep the software releasable at any time.
In the previous years of software development, having and maintaining a build system was considered a best practice. However, once the build was completed and unit tests all passed, there were still numerous manual processes that needed to be maintained in order to ensure the software solution was, in fact, releasable.
Some of the more popular post build tasks include the following:
- Installation verification
- Quality assurance testing
- Deployment environment provisioning
- Deployment
- Post-deployment verification...