Continuous Delivery Recipes - Introduction

We reached a point where most IT organizations have understood the benefits of Continuous Integration (CI) and a non-negligible part of us have now moved or are moving to Continuous Delivery (CD) or even Continuous Deployment. Being something quite demanding to set-up, I think that people moving to CD don’t just see it as a hype practice but as a truly worthy one, and that’s great!

The aim of these series is not to sell the idea of CD or to describe all of its aspects: some very smart people already wrote about it, as you can read by following the links in the previous paragraph. Instead, I would like to focus on specific examples of practices and tools that can help us in reaching this graal.

Indeed, until recently you couldn’t set-up your deployment pipeline without coding or configuring a good load of tools, and without a fair amount of thoughts and tries to organize your development. To be honest, I know there have been some products dedicated to this problem for long, but not anyone can afford their cost! Fortunately, things are moving fast: new tools are created, some existing ones are open-sourced, and more and more people are sharing about their experience going CD.

During the past year, I had the opportunity to start two projects in a continuous delivery fashion on my assignments. So my team and I have evaluated several tools and approaches. My hope with these series is that sharing about our experience will help someone to adopt CD!

Provisional Agenda

I plan to write the following articles, in no specific order and without any warranty of completion…

1. Development Flow: Branching Strategies
2. TODO Versioning
3. TODO How to Set-Up a Deployment Pipeline With GoCD
4. TODO How to Set-Up Multi-Branch Continuous Integration Using GitLab and GoCD
5. TODO How to Manage Multiple Environments With Ansible
6. TODO How to Create Fresh VMs Using KVM and Ansible
7. TODO How to Quickly Create Fresh Test Environments With Docker