JAX DevOps: What’s your first thought when you hear the following sentence: “The road to Continuous Deployment is paved with …?”

Michiel Rook: The road to Continuous Deployment is paved with interesting challenges! It’s definitely not an easy ride, but a very rewarding one.

JAX DevOps: Why is Continuous Deployment so important nowadays?

Rook: Continuous Deployment helps companies react faster to the market, be more in control of their product and test product ideas by running (short) experiments.

JAX DevOps: Can it help organizations innovate quickly enough to satisfy consumers’ expectations? How?

Rook: Continuous Deployment works because it provides the following: early feedback, faster recovery from failures and continuous improvement & learning, all through iterating with small steps.

JAX DevOps: What are the stages required to achieve Continuous Deployment and how important are they?

Rook: It all starts with Continuous Integration and Automated Testing. These should be combined in a Pipeline that automatically deploys the generated artefact to production. Add support for feature toggles to separate deployments from releases. Then, align the business and start implementing Hypothesis Driven Development to drive (business) goals based on concrete (market) data.

JAX DevOps: Do you have any tips on how to prevent problems from occurring? Do you have any lessons learned that you’d like to share with us?

Rook: To (successfully) implement CD, an organization has to change. Barriers should be broken down and collaboration promoted. When it comes to technical challenges, automation (of builds, testing, deployments, orchestration, etc.) is a key factor as well.

To (successfully) implement Continuous Deployment, an organization has to change.

JAX DevOps: What should participants learn from your session?

Rook: How to achieve Continuous Deployment on an existing large and ageing code base, while keeping the shop open for business.

Please complete the following questions:

Dev and Ops work best together if … they’re put together in a team.

The biggest obstacle for DevOps is … (corporate) culture.

What promotes employee satisfaction is … doing useful work, experiment, making a difference, being involved in the product.

The biggest advantage of autonomously-working teams is … cohesion, ownership and responsibility.

It is important for a positive company culture to … promote a no-blame environment, encourage ownership and responsibility and leave time for experimentation and research.