Some of you know me as an active conference speaker, sharing my knowledge of continuous delivery and other topics at conferences around the world, including JAX DevOps and JAX London. During some of these sessions, I talked about how CD can significantly improve the time to market, software quality, and speed of delivery. Indeed, continuous delivery is by now recognized as a pillar of modern software development.
Indeed, as research and market reports have shown, teams that apply continuous delivery in their work enjoy significantly lower change failure rates and faster time to recover from outages, when compared to teams that don’t. By deploying far more frequently and automating the entire build and deployment pipeline, these teams get fast feedback on their changes and are able to spend more time on actual work.
Even though the guidelines and principles that form continuous delivery have been spreading in the industry for years, it’s only now that they have really permeated into the enterprise software space. There’s a still lot of work to do though!
JAXenter asked me to write down my predictions for 2019 about continuous delivery. I’ve divided my predictions into a set of wishes (some perhaps more hopeful than others!), and a set of somewhat more realistic expectations.
| Wishes | Expectations |
| The “this isn’t possible with our application” discussions will finally come to an end. | Applications and systems will see an increased focus on reliability and observability. |
| Unwieldy monoliths around the world will enjoy fast pipelines and at-least-daily deployments to production. | “Pipeline as a Service” products become ubiquitous and even more accessible. |
| Long-lived feature branches will become known as “that thing we used to do”.
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More and more organizations will embrace continuous delivery principles. |
| Automated security scanners and other tooling become more tightly integrated into CI/CD pipelines. | |
| CD is recognized as a crucial cornerstone of DevOps. |
Table 1: Wishes and expectations for CD
Let me know what you think about these predictions, and please send me your own. Here’s to an exciting and interesting year!
