The cloud is more than just scale, it is also effortless deployment.
- Scott Hanselman, Hanselminutes 255
Kent Beck is talking about Continuous Delivery in Software Engineering Radio 167:
[In software engineering] the big trend is towards more frequent deployment. And that drives everything else: All the social changes that need to happen, the technical changes that need to happen. The changes in practice, languages, and infrastructure ... If you are deploying 50 times a day [...] the current separation between ops and dev has to go away ... Marketing, sales, business models: everything changes when you are deploying very frequently.
Here are two real world examples of continuos delivery:
First check out code.flickr.com, scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see something like:
Wow impressive!
Then check out the presentation Continuous Deployment to Production 50 Times a Day on InfoQ.
According to that presentation, the applications at wealthfront.com get deployed to productions 50 times a day (with peaks of 100 times a day). They have a sophisticated deployment pipeline with automated self-checking and self-rollback of their different production services.
Want to jump on the bandwagon? Get your copy of Continuous Delivery.
Update 2011-11-13: According to this presentation by Zach Holman GitHub deploys 10-40 times a day.
Another reference:
ReplyDeleteJay Fields about his work at DWR:
"In the past I've come in to work, received a feature request early in the trading session, coded the change, deployed it to production, and seen the profits as part of that same trading day."