The Tools For
Continuous
Delivery
Table of Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................................................3
Benefits of Continuous Delivery .............................................................................................4
Launching Continuous Delivery in Your Organization.......................................................6
The Tools for Continuous Delivery .........................................................................................8
Easier Releases and More Innovation....................................................................................9
Author: Aliza Earnshaw
Acknowledgements
Editor: Molly Niendorf
With thanks to Sze Wa Cheung, Christy McCreath, Gareth Rushgrove
and Tim Zonca
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 2
Introduction
Organizations create, deliver and modify software to fill business needs. Those
business needs are not static: They can change as suddenly as breaking news. Any
organization using software to serve its customers and really, thats almost every
company, nonprofit or institution has to find a way to develop, release and modify
software more frequently and easily. Thats why organizations of all sizes and types
are implementing continuous delivery; they cant afford to be left behind by more
responsive and agile competitors.
Martin Fowlers definition of continuous delivery sums it up well: Briefly, its when any
version of your software can be deployed to any of your environments on demand,
and the team prioritizes keeping software deployable over releasing new features.
Paradoxically, it gets a lot easier to release new features when youre working this way.
This paper offers an overview of the benefits of continuous delivery, the steps for
launching it in your organization, and the kinds of tools youll need to make delivery of
small, frequent changes to working code an everyday reality.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 3
Benefits of Continuous Delivery
When its well executed, continuous delivery allows an organization to respond more
quickly to its market and to customers, both internal and external. It also makes life
saner for people in IT operations, software development and quality testing teams.
Instead of long periods of development punctuated by looming deadlines, big dramatic
releases and panicked remediation of serious bugs, software releases are small,
predictable and less dramatic even boring.
Deliver software with fewer bugs and lower risk.
When you release smaller changes more frequently, you catch errors much earlier
in the development process, because you are testing more often against existing
code and infrastructure.
Smaller changes are easier to roll back than huge, complex ones.
Automated testing at every stage of development means you dont pass failed code
to the next stage.
Small changes make it easier to identify what element in new code broke something.
Release new features to market more frequently and learn.
When you release changes to customers more frequently whether internal or
external you get earlier, more frequent feedback, telling you whether youre on the
right track to pleasing the people who matter most.
Enlisting your customers as development partners gives them a sense of co-
ownership. As you create this pattern of collaboration and interaction, you build buy-
in with internal customers and loyalty with external customers. And theyll be more
ready to forgive you when you stumble (yes, sometimes that happens!).
IT teams that provide their organization the ability to iterate and learn are providing
a very high business value. The 2014 State of DevOps survey data showed that
publicly traded companies with high-performing IT organizations had 50 percent
higher market capitalization growth over three years than companies with lower-
performing IT. Plus, these high-performing companies were more than twice as likely
to outperform their own targets for productivity, profitability and market share than
their peers with lower-performing IT.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 4
Respond to market conditions more quickly.
Market conditions change constantly. Regulations get modified; cybersecurity alerts
are broadcast; consumer trends erupt like strange new diseases. (Your competitors
arent just standing still and watching, either.) Whether youve just discovered a
new product is losing money, or that more customers are visiting your site from
smartphones than laptops, its much easier to make a fast change if you are already
practicing continuous delivery.
Life is saner for everyone IT operations, software development, QA,
product owners, business line owners.
Continuous delivery means the responsibility for software delivery is distributed
much more widely and shared responsibility makes life better. To achieve
continuous delivery, you have to increase collaboration between teams all along the
software delivery process, both by coming to agreement on goals and by aligning
the work around a common toolchain. As your teams collaborate more effectively,
power and responsibility can be shared even more. Best of all, a successful release
becomes a shared success, one you can all celebrate together.
Practiced well, continuous delivery can take a lot of stress out of software release.
Big complex releases come with big risks, and are highly stressful. Even the smartest
and most creative people cant come up with great solutions when theyre exhausted
from night after night of 2 AM calls, or weeks of 20-hour days fixing buggy code.
Releasing smaller changes more often gets everyone used to a regular, predictable
pace, leaving room for coming up with ideas and taking pleasure in the work.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 5
Launching Continuous Delivery in Your Organization
Continuous delivery involves a number of tools and processes. In this section, well talk
about the processes and practices you need to have in place, and in the next section,
well highlight the tools you need.
Monitor everything.
Collect and analyze data on your production and test environments. You need to know
where your baseline performance is, so you can see where to make improvements,
and gauge whether you have actually made them. Monitoring tools also offer alerts
and reporting.
Put all production artifacts into version control.
You need a version control system to keep a record of every version of every feature,
add-on or other change to the code base. Infrastructure configurations and changes
must also be checked into version control.
Developers must continually integrate new changes into the code base.
You need a continuous integration tool so you can integrate all changes, and trigger
automated tests on every build. You also need reports to tell you which builds pass
and which fail.
Automated tests.
These should be triggered by code check-in, so you dont pass faulty code to the
next stage. Remember that you can build tests for many things: performance,
scalability, security, internal policy violations, and more.
Automate the configuration of development, test, QA and production servers.
You need a single process for creating all environments so you can make production-
like environments available early in the development process.
Code review.
Many organizations have change review boards. The 2014 State of DevOps survey
found that organizations practicing peer code review were able to release code
more quickly than those that required deployment approval from a change review
board without any increase in failed deployments.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 6
Release smaller changes.
Bigger releases have more bugs, and they can be harder to sort out and fix, because
theres so much more to check. CSG Systems International, an outsourced billing and
customer care company, reduced release size by 50 percent and saw a steep decline
in disruptions due to releases, and in disruptions in general. (If youre interested
in learning more about how CSG applied DevOps principles in a large enterprise
environment, you can watch a talk by Scott Prugh, CSGs chief architect and vice
president of software development, at the DevOps Enterprise Summit.)
Institute blameless postmortems.
If you want continuous improvement (and you should), you need a culture that
encourages and supports people when they surface bad news, and that views open
discussion of failures as the path to improvement. Sam Eaton, director of engineering
operations at Yelp, tells the story of how his ops team at Future PL moved from
a culture of blame to a culture of learning together by notifying colleagues quickly
about failures, and bringing failcake. People appreciated being told up front what had
happened, and the cake sweetened the deal.
Use dashboards to promote communication.
Many of the tools in the next section include dashboards. You want to use these for
communicating the state of your infrastructure, number and types of incidents and
other information to your colleagues, both in IT and outside.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 7
The Tools for Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a process that involves a number of tools. Weve listed those
that are most commonly used across a range of industries, in companies of all
different sizes and stages of development.
Monitoring tools
Graphite - An open source tool for storing data and rendering it graphically.
Logstash - An open source tool for managing logs and other event data from your
systems.
Nagios - A monitoring and alerting tool for servers, switches, applications and
services.
Splunk - A tool for monitoring and visualizing data from your website, applications,
servers, networks and other devices.
Version control tools
Git - An open source version control system (VCS) thats distributed, so you can check
in code and merge it while you are working offline.
Mercurial - Like Git, Mercurial is an open source distributed VCS, so you can check in
code and merge it while working offline.
Perforce - A proprietary version control system that supports Git.
Subversion - An open source version control system.
Team Foundation Server - Microsofts VCS. Includes continuous integration, issue
tracking and product management capabilities.
Continuous integration tools
Bamboo - A proprietary tool from Atlassian that runs builds and tests.
Go - An open source continuous integration tool created by continuous delivery
consulting firm ThoughtWorks, which offers paid support for Go.
Hudson - An open source continuous integration tool with automated continuous
build and monitoring of externally-run jobs (for example, cron jobs).
Jenkins - An open source continuous integration tool with automated continuous
build and monitoring of externally-run jobs (for example, cron jobs).
Team City - Proprietary continuous integration system that integrates with Git and
Mercurial.
Travis - A proprietary continuous integration system.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 8
Configuration management tool
Puppet - Our configuration management platform is available both as an open
source project and as a proprietary offering for enterprise companies. Puppet
includes many other open-source projects, including Beaker for automated
acceptance testing and R10K, an automated module deployment tool.
Code review tools
Gerrit - A web-based code review system that enables online code review for projects
using the Git version control system.
GitHub - An online system for collaboration, code review and and code management.
Available for free or as a for-pay enterprise service.
Stash - A proprietary tool from Atlassian for reviewing code in Git, with enhanced
security and other features for enterprise use.
Easier Releases and More Innovation
Continuous delivery reflects the fast-paced world of constant change that we all live
in and has helped to create that state. Releasing small changes more frequently
gets your team into a different set of habits, turning what was once a stressful event
into a regular, routine part of doing business. With continuous delivery, you get new
ideas out to your customers more often, so you can learn from their responses and
iterate further. Its how forward-thinking companies are doing business and you
should be, too.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 9
Resources
2014 State of DevOps Report. The results of a survey of more than 9,000 IT
professionals around the world, this report tells you the tools and practices
that organizations are using to improve IT and business performance. Plenty
of insight into organizational culture and stronger collaboration across technical
departments, too.
Automated Configuration Management: Why it Matters & How to Get Started.
Without a configuration management solution, youll end up managing packages,
configuration files, firewall rules and other common settings manually. The risk of
error is high, and youre consuming time you could use on projects and initiatives
that deliver more value to your organization.
Puppet Enterprise is an IT automation solution that
gives you the power to easily automate repetitive tasks,
quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively
manage infrastructure, both on-premise and in the cloud.
Questions?
Stop by Ask.PuppetLabs.com or contact our sales team.
The Tools For Continuous Delivery 10
