Continuous Deployment: Implications and Implementation

This whitepaper examines the origins of Continuous Deployment, its importance for developers as well as businesses, its benefits, and common pitfalls. It also explores NexJ Systems’ experience with CD and our recommended best practices.

The Continuous Delivery Pipeline is, simply put, a set of steps that a company’s code changes must go through to make their way to production. The Pipeline comprises four elements — Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand — and this white paper takes a closer look at the third one, Continuous Deployment (CD).

CD starts with actual coding, and then involves taking validated features from a staging environment and deploying them into the production environment, where they are readied for release. Deployed changes must be moved to production in a way that does not affect the behavior of the current system, which is why CD can also be described as a series of incremental changes that can continually be deployed to production but are released to end users only when the time is right.