Continous Delivery to Production
What is it
Continous Delivery to Production means to apply Continous Delivery methodology in such a way that changes are shipped on-demand to production near-immediately after being reviewed, tested and merged.
An alternative to this technique might be to have orchestrated releases of multiple changes into production according to some cadence. However, research and industry experience reports show that deploying on-demand leads to:
- Lower development costs
- Higher bandwidth
- Faster innovation
One commonly referred to case study with hard data is the continous delivery transformation of the LaserJet Firmware team at HP.
When to use it
Use Continous Delivery to production for your backend systems, unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise.
This technique must be used in tandem with robust observability instrumentation and on-call setup, to ensure minimize time to recovery in the rare cases that errors make it past the automated tests and reach production.