Continuous Deployment

Methods of delivering software are constantly evolving in order to increase speed to market without sacrificing reliability and stability. Mastering development end to end, from version control to production, and building production-ready code is now more important than ever. Continuous deployment takes it one step further. This method for delivering software automates the final step to production and enables faster feedback and safer releases.

Based on years of work with medium to large organizations at Thoughtworks, author Valentina Servile explains how to perform safe and reliable deployments with no manual gate to production. You’ll learn a framework to perform incremental, safe releases during everyday development work, structured exclusively around the challenges of continuous deployment in nontrivial, distributed systems. Complete with interviews and case studies from fellow industry professionals.

Close the feedback loop and leverage the production environment to manage your end-to-end development lifecycle efficiently. This book helps you:

• Take observability, performance, test automation, and security into account when splitting work into increments
• Create a daily development plan that takes immediate deployments to production into account
• Deploy work in progress to production incrementally without causing regressions
• Use patterns to refactor live functionality and alter persistence layers
• Test and release features in production using different feature toggle configurations

Table of Contents

Part I. Continuous Deployment

Chapter 1. Continuous Deployment

Chapter 2. Benefits

Chapter 3. The Mindset Shift

Chapter 4. You Must Be This Tall

Chapter 5. Challenges

Part II. Before Development

Chapter 6. Slicing Upcoming Work

Chapter 7. Building for Production

Part Ill. During Development

Chapter 8. Adding New Features

Chapter 9. Refactoring Live Features

Chapter 10. Data and Data Loss

Part IV. After Development

Chapter 11. Testing in Production

Chapter 12. Releasing

Conclusion and Next Steps

Part V. Case Studies

Case Study: AutoScout24

Case Study: OTTO

Case Study: N26

Case Study: ClimatePartner

Case Study: Motability Operations

Case Study: REA Group

Case Study: Maze

Case Study: TravelPerk

About the Author

Valentina Servile is Lead Software Developer at ThoughtWorks based in Bangkok, working with and advising multiple clients on continuous deployment in distributed systems. She has worked in several cross-functional teams dealing with big distributed systems and microservices, continuous delivery practices, and evolutionary architectures in a variety of tech stacks.

As well as writing code, she enjoys mentoring her colleagues and helping ThoughtWorks advise their clients on how to improve their software delivery practices in order to release safely and often – and enable their businesses to respond to change.