Section 6: Continuous Delivery

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What are the benefits of Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment

Objectives

• Understand the benefits of Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment.

In this section of the course we will learn about Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.

What is Continuous Delivery?

We have learned how we can automate building, linting and testing our application automatically using BitBucket Pipelines. Remember that certain commits would trigger a pipeline defined in a bitbucket-pipelines.yml file that runs on BitBucket’s cloud server.

The next step is to also automate the deployment of the application through a BitBucket Pipeline. This is called Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery.

What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

With Continuous Delivery we mean that the build, test, and staging environment deployment are all automated. Also the production deployment process is automated, but it still requires a human to press a button before a new release is deployed to production.

With Continuous Deployment, there is no human gatekeeper anymore, the whole process is automated. For example, when a new merge is made into the main branch, and all builds and tests are successfully completed, the application is automatically deployed to production. This allows for an even swifter deployment cycle.

Depending on your needs you can choose one over the other.

Exercise: What are benefits of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

What do you think are benefits of Continous Delivery/Continuous Deployment? Discuss with your neighbour.

Time: 5 mins

Solution

• Automated software release process
• Improve developer productivity
• Address bugs quickly
• Reduce human error
• Deliver updates fast
• Deployments are coupled to your version control system

In this section we will:

• Learn how we can use BitBucket Pipelines to automate the software release process.

Key Points

• Continuous Delivery automates the software release process, which enables you to deliver updates faster