What is Continuous Delivery? Tools and Best Practices

What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Delivery (CD) processes to build, test, configure and ready to deploy from a build to the production environment at any time. This process is automated and is an extension of continuous integration. The purpose of CD is to keep production up to date by integrating the latest code available in version control or with any required package as soon as possible. Note: It is possible to have Continuous Integration without CD, but it's challenging to have Continuous Delivery without Continuous Integration.

Continuous Delivery Platform?

NexaStack is a Continuous Delivery Platform that Automates, Monitors, and Analyzes your Cloud-Native Application Delivery. It accelerates your Data-Driven Application Delivery with proper visibility and security. NexaStack was initiated as an internal project of XenonStack in 2014 and developed to serve the internal requirements of our team.

A strategy in which the development teams ensure the software is reliable to release at any time.” Click to explore about, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Why Continuous Delivery Matters?

• The software release is getting slower than usual.
• Ensure products quality is up to the mark along with the speedy delivery to users.
• Provides online services (as it's not compulsory).
• Build new products at a faster pace and release to improve quality.
• Reduce vulnerabilities in products, by releasing security patches often.

Why do we need Continuous Delivery and DevOps?

DevOps is a process and balanced organization approach for improving the collaboration, communication among development and operation. It is the process of redesigning and finding new ways for faster and Reliable Delivery.

How Continuous Delivery Works?

How to adopt Continuous Delivery?

Organizations that integrate continuous delivery in their process make mistakes, such as assuming CD as an end-state or a goal or spending a lot of time worrying about what products to use. So, how do they adopt it in their organization? Below are some points to be considered during adaptation -

• First Organization's Architecture.
• What Culture followed?
• Follow the principle of Continuous Integration and Deployment, and make CI process as efficient as possible.
• Automate the testing process and add manual testing, too, if needed.
• Automate the build and deploy task.

How Continuous Delivery adoption is successful?

Everything is relative. Define success parameters like expectations after adopting Continuous Delivery in the organization. That parameter obviously should be in the domain, which means we can't define "we live more as the parameter," right? Set the parameters more carefully and thoughtfully because, in the end, everyone will deduce the result by these defined threshold values.

What are the Continuous Delivery adoption challenges?

• The automation price is not small.
• It's challenging to adopt the CD if someone is not following the Microservices architecture.
• Organizational culture and architecture.

Why choose the Continuous Delivery Platform - NexaStack?

The technical reasons for choosing NexaStack for continuous delivery are highlighted below:

NexaStack for Developers

• Self-Provision Resources

  NexaStack empowers Developers to provision Infrastructure independently and build an environment to start development rapidly. It helps break the wall of confusion between Developers and System Admins.

• Continuous Delivery

  Leaner and flexible by providing fast release cycles with the help of Continuous Delivery. Deploy from SCM to Production within minutes with the fully automated build pipeline.

NexaStack for Operations

• Multi-Cloud Support

  Integration with multiple cloud platforms in one place by providing an abstraction layer between Multi-Cloud platform APIs.

• Runbook Automation

  NexaStack's Auto-Config Management Engine reduces operations complexity by providing a single location for all runbook execution and supporting leading Configuration Management Software.

• Define Topologies

  For sophisticated software running on multiple technologies, NexaStack helps define topologies for applications running on MultiTier and Microservices.

Features of Continuous Delivery Platform 

1. Adaptive and Secure (DevOps Delivery Pipeline)—NexaStack's DevOps Infrastructure is agile and flexible, supporting different workflows and modern data centres with technologies from various decades.

2. MicroServices (Serverless Computing): Provision, Configure, and Manage Infrastructure to enable collaboration and automation for faster and more reliable software delivery.

3. Integrations: NexaStack Plug N Play Integrations support

• Cloud Integration—Use NexaStack for 'On-Premises' Infrastructure with the help of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure with Leading Public Cloud Providers like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and more.

• Database Integration - Supported runbooks to provision databases in your technology stack, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL Server, Elastic Search, MySQL, Oracle, and more.

• Languages and Frameworks - Multiple languages and the industry's leading framework support include Golang, Python, C++, JavaScript, Dot Net, Java, C, and more.

NexaStack is a DevOps Platform for Automating, Monitoring, and analysing Application Delivery. It accelerates Data-Driven Application Delivery with proper visibility and security.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery mechanisms are applied to test server configuration, server image building, environment provisioning and the mixture of environments.” Click to explore about, How to Implement Infrastructure as Code in CI/CD Pipeline?

What are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery?

• The software is delivered with fewer bugs and lower risk.
• Improve Developer Productivity and efficiency.
• The software Release Process is automated.
• Finding bugs becomes more accessible, and so does addressing them.
• Improve Customer Satisfaction.

What are the best practices for Continuous Delivery?

So, any organization that is willing to or is already practising CD should know the best practices to make CD successful and more efficient. Below are some points someone should consider -

• An organization should follow the trend of "Build your binaries only once."

• Deploy the same way to all environments, whether production, user acceptance testing, or any other.

• One should do the smoke test of deployments.

• Continuous Delivery should follow Instantaneous propagation, which means the CD should be the ongoing process of build, test, and release (the most common one).

• The CD should include the Database.

• Firstly, deploy to a similar environment to the production one before deploying to production.

• Implement GitOps.

• Monitor the CD pipeline and restart the pipeline once any stage fails.

• Automate everything.

NOTE - The organization should take care of security and try to make the pipeline as secure as possible, such as following the Pull-type pattern rather than the push-type.

What are the best Continuous Delivery Tools?

Codefresh

Codefresh is a modern CI/CD toolchain based on GitOps and Argo. It takes full advantage of the open-source Argo toolkit. It provides essential enterprise features such as a unified user interface, a single pane for cloud-scale management, enterprise-grade secure execution, and the ability to end-to-end checkout and single sign-on across multiple apps.

 FluxCD

 FluxCD is an open-source continuous delivery engine designed for Kubernetes. It automates the deployment and management of applications in a Kubernetes cluster. FluxCD uses GitOps, a Git-centric approach to CDs, to manage the desired state of clusters in Git and automatically match the actual state to the cluster.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud CD platform designed to make it easy to reliably and quickly release software changes. Spinnaker provides a pipeline-based CD approach that allows developing teams to automate and visualize the entire software delivery process, from building and testing to deployment and monitoring.

Argo CD

Argo CD is an open-source CD tool that uses GitOps to manage and deploy an application on Kubernetes at scale. It is designed to be highly scalable and works by continuously synchronizing the desired application state as defined in Git with the live state of the cluster.

GoCD

GoCD is an open-source CD engine that provides a pipeline-based software distribution approach. It helps organizations automate and streamline the software delivery process, from creating and testing code changes to deploying them to production.

Harness

Harness is a continuous deployment and delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps organizations automate processes of delivering software changes to production. It provides features such as continuous integration, automation of the deployment process, and continuous updates.

GitLab

GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager that provides continuous integration, source code management (SCM), and more. The platform helps manage the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), from planning to implementation. With GitLab, teams can manage and host their source code repositories, track bugs, and collaborate with other teams on their projects.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps provides features for different roles on the DevOps team, including developers, IT, and project managers. Users can access these features through an IDE client or a web browser. This suite offers two deployment types: Azure DevOps Services for the cloud and Azure DevOps Server for on-premises deployments.

Continuous Delivery Platform NexaStack Technology Solutions

• NexaStack Essentials (For Startups)—In NexaStack Essentials, we take care of a startup's basic needs for hassle-free IT and Application Lifecycle Operations.

• NexaStack Productivity (For DevOps Team) - NexaStack Productivity is best suited for workloads that are planning or already in production and looking forward to adopting the DevOps Approach.

• NexaStack Enterprise (Enterprise Stack) - Create a single file for your project to describe the type of machine you want, the software that needs to be installed and the way you want to access the machine.

Enable Cloud Native Applications Development with Continuous Delivery Best Practices for collaboration, version control, automated testing, and compliance. CI/CD Consulting Services for DevOps Implementation

How Can XenonStack help you?

By incorporating DevOps Culture into your organization, you can deploy your code 30 times more frequently than your competitor with less than 50% of deployment fails. By adopting DevOps culture, you can collaborate with your team, which is composed of cross-functional team members, including developers, QA, DBAs, Business Analysts, Operation Engineers, and so forth, which deliver many benefits such as continuous software delivery, less complex problems to fix, faster resolution of issues and a more stable operating environment. You are advised to look into the below steps: