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Yes it's aspirational, and of course you have to do batching when the rate of commits gets too high. Many companies don't actually end up at the end of the spec

Yes it's aspirational, and of course you have to do batching when the rate of commits gets too high. Many companies don't actually end up at the end of the spectrum with full continuous delivery; most of the value is captured by building what's needed _to be able to_ if you chose to, and doing say daily or hourly automated deploys. If you're not familiar with the general arguments for why CD might be desirable, a good place to start would be the books Continuous Delivery [https://smile.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley-ebook/dp/B003YMNVC0/ https://smile.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Auto...] or Accelerate [https://smile.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations-ebook/dp/B07B9F83WM/ https://smile.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Tech...]. The TLDR would be that most deploy problems in practice turn out to be because the process is manual, infrequently-used, and/or unreliable, and by practicing "if it hurts, do it more often" you are forced to iron out those kinks. For example you can't deploy automatically without a good acceptance/smoke test suite, and without solid DB migration testing/linting/practices, to name just two of many. You could just build all these things without trying to do CD, but in practice it seems that it's quite hard for organizations to prioritize this work in isolation, and the goal of CD seems to provide a fairly clear map to a much higher-quality deploy process. The practice of deploying more frequently to flush out issues, is also quite unintuitive as you note. Here's a (probably out-of-date) article on how FB did deploys in 2017: https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/facebook-release-scale/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/facebook-release-scale/ -- batched commits and staged canary rollouts automatically cut and released every few hours.

wizofaus 4y ago
Yes I do get the general argument for CD (though I have issues with how universally it can be applied based on the sort of BVT I've had to do for SaaS platforms I worked on in the past, where it just wasn't possible to safely release new versions of key components without needing several days' worth of testing, most of which was waiting for verification that interactions with banks etc. had worked as expected).
- theptip 4y ago
  Agreed, like almost everything it’s not universally applicable. If you have external contracts that are onerous to validate then it can be quite expensive to build high-fidelity internal representations of those contracts. Could still be ROI positive to do so! In most cases the contracts are either internal or simple (non-temporal) external contracts like a REST API, so most orgs benefit from moving in this direction.

wizofaus 4y ago

Yes I do get the general argument for CD (though I have issues with how universally it can be applied based on the sort of BVT I've had to do for SaaS platforms I worked on in the past, where it just wasn't possible to safely release new versions of key components without needing several days' worth of testing, most of which was waiting for verification that interactions with banks etc. had worked as expected).

theptip 4y ago
Agreed, like almost everything it’s not universally applicable. If you have external contracts that are onerous to validate then it can be quite expensive to build high-fidelity internal representations of those contracts. Could still be ROI positive to do so! In most cases the contracts are either internal or simple (non-temporal) external contracts like a REST API, so most orgs benefit from moving in this direction.