持续部署

我们认为，组织应该在可能的情况下采用 持续部署 实践。持续部署是指自动将每个通过自动化测试的更改部署到生产环境中的实践。这种做法是快速反馈循环的关键推动力，使组织能够更快速和高效地为客户提供价值。持续部署与持续交付的区别在于，它只要求代码“可以”在任何时候进行部署；并不要求每个更改“实际被”部署到生产环境中。我们过去一直犹豫将持续部署移入“采纳”环节，因为这是一种需要在软件交付其他领域具备高水平成熟度的实践，因此并不适合所有团队。然而，Thoughtwork 同事 Valentina Servile 最近出版的书籍<持续部署> 提供了在组织中实施这一实践的全面指南。它为组织提供了一条实现所需成熟度以采用持续部署实践的路线图。

If you are wondering “What comes after agile?,” you should look towards continuous delivery. While your development processes may be fully optimized, it still might take your organization weeks or months to get a single change into production. Continuous delivery focuses on maximizing automation including infrastructure as code, environment management and deployment automation to ensure your system is always ready for production. It is about tightening your feedback loops and not putting off anything until the end. Continuous delivery is not the same as continuous deployment, which means deploying every change to production. Continuous delivery is not a cowboy show. It puts you in charge of your production environment. The business can pick and choose what and when to deploy. If you think you’ve nailed agile development, but aren’t considering how to achieve continuous delivery, you really haven’t even started.

The past 2 years or more has seen a proliferation of continuous integration tools and platforms leading to substantial innovation in the build and release space. Distribution of builds is one such innovation and yet another is the way in which builds are now structured to make greater use of automation in various stages of the build. Build pipelines help to provide greater insight into the quality of each build and the environments to which they have been deployed. A natural expansion of the build pipeline meme is the adoption of continuous deployment techniques, where the intention is to extend the build pipeline into the production environment. This relies on automated deployment techniques and authorization mechanisms built into the continuous integration toolset. One of the key benefits is the ability to move new functionality into production rapidly and reliably.