Continuous deployment

Continuous Delivery without multi-versioning is irresponsible

—Gojko Adzic

Benefits of continuous delivery:

• reduced technical risk of releases
• faster time to market
• deal with product faults and recalls a lot cheaper (than your competition)
• take away the drama from releases
• make things run smoothly and predictably
• customers tend to feel more entitlement
• multi-versioning opens up some amazing business capabilities, like:
  • gentle/gradual release of high risk or experimental features
  • running product experiments on 1% of the live user base to prove costly assumptions;
  • offering early access to premium customers
  • hot-fixing and preventing problems much cheaper than before;
  • running marketing initiatives around marketing events rather than technical deployment capabilities.

continuous delivery must:

• keep users in the clear;
• maintain users’ steady flow of work or sessions; and
• facilitate and soothe marketing initiatives.

Related

• feature toggle
• multi-versioning