The Top 4 Benefits of Continuous Delivery

Many organizations now rely on continuous delivery as an essential part of their development pipelines. By automating every stage of the delivery process, IT operations teams are able to make updates swiftly and accurately while significantly reducing the potential for errors.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of continuous delivery and how IT automation tools from Puppet can help.

Table of Contents:

• What Is Continuous Delivery?
• Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
• What Are the Benefits of Continuous Delivery?
• Reap the Benefits of Continuous Delivery With Puppet

What Is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous delivery is a software development practice that automates and streamlines the software delivery process, ensuring that new versions of code are always ready for deployment and can be quickly and reliably delivered to customers.

This practice minimizes the manual intervention required in the software delivery process, helping to reduce the number of errors and making it possible to deliver new code more quickly. It also allows for more efficient development and testing, ensuring that software is ready at every stage of the development lifecycle.

Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment

The primary difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the extra step to approve updates before pushing to production.

Continuous delivery automates the process of pushing new code to a non-production environment such as a staging or testing server. This allows developers to complete tasks like integration and performance testing in a safe environment prior to releasing the code to the public.

Continuous deployment takes this process one step further and automates the deployment of the application to production. This means that once the code has passed through the development pipeline and all tests have been successfully completed, the code is automatically deployed to the production environment.

Both of these processes are important components of your automated workflow, as they allow for rapid, efficient development.

Read more: Continuous delivery vs. deployment: What's the difference?

What Are the Benefits of Continuous Delivery?

When it’s well executed, continuous delivery allows an organization to respond more quickly to its market and 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.

Here are four of the top benefits of continuous delivery:

1. Deliver software with fewer bugs and lower risk

When you release smaller changes more frequently, you catch errors much earlier in the development process. When you implement automated testing at every stage of development, you don’t pass failed code to the next stage. And it’s easier to roll back smaller changes when you need to.

2. Release new features to market more frequently — and learn

Releasing new features early and often — even in a minimally viable state — means you get more frequent feedback, giving you the ability to iterate and learn from your customers. Enlisting customers as development partners gives them a sense of co-ownership and loyalty and makes them more likely to forgive when you stumble.

3. Respond to marketing conditions more quickly.

Market conditions change constantly. Whether you’ve just discovered a new product is losing money or that more customers are visiting your site from smartphones than laptops, it’s much easier to make a fast change if you are already practicing continuous delivery.

4. Life is saner for everyone: IT operations, software development, QA, product owners, and business line owners.

Continuous delivery means the responsibility for software delivery is distributed much more widely, and this shared responsibility and collaboration make life better. It also takes a lot of stress out of software release. Releasing smaller changes more often gets everyone used to a regular, predictable pace, leaving room to come up with ideas and actually enjoy your work. Best of all, a successful release becomes a shared success, one you can all celebrate together.

Reap the Benefits of Continuous Delivery For Puppet Enterprise

With the right continuous delivery workflows and tools, you can maximize the agility and productivity of your development and operations teams. 

Puppet Enterprise is the leading solution for automating all stages of the software development workflow, from continuous integration to deployment. It provides a comprehensive set of tools for monitoring and managing software releases, allowing teams to track their progress and make changes quickly and easily.

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise is Puppet’s CI/CD tool that makes it easy to create repeatable, reliable, and secure pipelines for delivering applications and infrastructure changes. It enables Dev and Ops teams to quickly and accurately deploy changes, reduce time-to-market, and maintain quality and stability of their deployments.

Discover the benefits of Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise for yourself. Get up and running with a trial today!

Try Puppet Enterprise

Learn More

• Learn more about Jez Humble, Co-Author of Continuous Delivery
• Why the automation of continuous integration is key to your workflow
• Learn about the powerful estate reporting capabilities with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise
• Case Study: How Skyguide used Puppet to set up a continuous delivery pipeline

This blog was originally published on December 15, 2014 and has since been updated for accuracy and relevance.