Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler)) [Hardcover]

Jez Humble (Author), David Farley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0321601912 | ISBN-13: 978-0321601919 | Edition: 1

Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award!

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.

This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable

rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through

automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between

developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—

sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

 

Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk

delivery process. Next, they introduce the “deployment pipeline,” an automated process for

managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the “ecosystem” needed to

support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance.

 

The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management

and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best

practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes

 

• Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software

• Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels

• Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations

• Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams

• Implementing an effective configuration management strategy

• Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation

• Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements

• Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases

• Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies

• Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing

 

Whether you’re a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your

organization move from idea to release faster than ever—so you can deliver value to your business

rapidly and reliably.

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

“If you need to deploy software more frequently, this book is for you. Applying it will help you reduce risk, eliminate tedious work, and increase confidence. I’ll be using the principles and practices here on all my current projects.”

–Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute

 

“Whether or not your software development team already understands that continuous integration is every bit as necessary as source code control, this is required reading. This book is unique in tying the whole development and delivery process together, providing a philosophy and principles, not just techniques and tools. The authors make topics from test automation to automated deployment accessible to a wide audience. Everyone on a development team, including programmers, testers,  system administrators, DBAs, and managers, needs to read this book.”

–Lisa Crispin, co-author of Agile Testing

 

“For many organizations Continuous Delivery isn’t just a deployment methodology, it’s critical to doing business. This book shows you how to make Continuous Delivery an effective reality in your environment.”

–James Turnbull, author of Pulling Strings with Puppet

 

“A clear, precise, well-written book that gives readers an idea of what to expect for the release process. The authors give a step-by-step account of expectations and hurdles for software deployment. This book is a necessity for any software engineer’s library.”

–Leyna Cotran, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine

 

“Humble and Farley illustrates what makes fast-growing web applications successful. Continuous deployment and delivery has gone from controversial to commonplace and this book covers it excellently. It’s truly the intersection of development and operations on many levels, and these guys nailed it.”

–John Allspaw, VP Technical Operations, Etsy.com and author of

 

The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations

“If you are in the business of building and delivering a software-based service, you would be well served to internalize the concepts that are so clearly explained in Continuous Delivery. But going beyond just the concepts, Humble and Farley provide an excellent playbook for rapidly and reliably delivering change.”

–Damon Edwards, President of DTO Solutions and co-editor of dev2ops.org

 

“I believe that anyone who deals with software releases would be able to pick up this book, go to any chapter and quickly get valuable information; or read the book from cover to cover and be able to streamline their build and deploy process in a way that makes sense for their organization. In my opinion, this is an essential handbook for building, deploying, testing, and releasing software.”

–Sarah Edrie, Director of Quality Engineering, Harvard Business School

 

“Continuous Delivery is the logical next step after Continuous Integration for any modern software team. This book takes the admittedly ambitous goal of constantly delivering valuable software to customers, and makes it achievable through a set of clear, effective principles and practices.”

–Rob Sanheim, Principal at Relevance, Inc.

About the Author

Dave Farley has been having fun with computers for nearly 30 years. Over that period he has worked on most types of software, from firmware, through tinkering with operating systems and device drivers, to writing games, and commercial applications of all shapes and sizes. He started working in large scale distributed systems about 20 years ago, doing research into the development of loose-coupled, message-based systems - a forerunner of SOA. He has a wide range of experience leading the development of complex software in teams, both large and small, in the UK and USA. Dave was an early adopter of agile development techniques, employing iterative development, continuous integration and significant levels of automated testing on commercial projects from the early 1990s. He honed his approach to agile development in his four and a half year stint at ThoughtWorks where he was a technical principal working on some of their biggest and most challenging projects. Dave is currently working for the London Multi-Asset Exchange (LMAX), an organization that is building one of the highest performance financial exchanges in the world, where they rely upon all of the major techniques described in this book.

 

Jez Humble has been fascinated by computers and electronics since getting his first ZX Spectrum aged 11, and spent several years hacking on Acorn machines in 6502 and ARM assembler and BASIC until he was old enough to get a proper job. He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services and on-line retail companies. Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London and San Francisco. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MMus in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is presently living in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (August 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321601912
• ISBN-13: 978-0321601919
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 1.3 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Testing
  • #53 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great nuggets lost in a repetitive bog October 4, 2011

By D. Golden

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is packed full of great ideas, but it suffers from painful redundancy. In response to another review, an author claims that it was intentional, so that one could skip around without reading from cover to cover. My response to that is that they should have had better editors. I have read many technical books designed for skipping around. None were as tediously repetitive as this one. Eventually, one has to expect that the reader is going to read more than one chapter and might even remember something from a previous chapter and do them the courtesy of not belaboring the main points each time. It's not even limited to once per chapter. The repetition frequently continues within each chapter, section by section.

That said, there are some good gems inside. My favorite parts might be the many real-world stories of how things can go wrong or how applying some of the principles smoothed things out. The detail, diversity and verisimilitude of those anecdotes sets the book apart from many books in the field.

I wish I could say this was a "must have" book, but it's really more of a "must skim" sort of book.

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How to deliver software to users at the click of a button September 12, 2010

By Paul M. Duvall

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is one of the most important software books published in years. From the beginning and throughout the book, the authors emphasize the importance in establishing one delivery team consisting of various experts throughout the software lifecycle - developers, DBAs, Systems/Operations, network specialists, testers and so on. The overarching pattern the authors describe is the Deployment Pipeline, which is basically a staged process consisting of all of the steps to go from bare/virtual metal to a working system whenever there is a change to source files. Of course, the only way this can be done is through copious amounts of automation. The other key point the authors make is that this automated delivery system - itself - is versioned with every change. Not just the custom source code, but also the operating system(s), tools, configuration and everything necessary to create a working software system - a crucial aspect of the Deployment Pipeline.

To sum up key points from the book in a few bullets:

* The purpose of Continuous Delivery is to reduce the cycle time between an idea and usable software
* Automate (almost) everything necessary to create usable software
* Version complete software systems (not just source code) for every change committed to version control system
* Employ a Deployment Pipeline in which the entire system is recreated whenever a change is committed to the version-control system and provide continuous feedback
* Identify one delivery team consisting of various delivery experts - build, deploy, provisioning, database, testing, etc. - a concept emphasized in the DevOps movement

The authors go into great detail in describing each of these themes. So, if you want the process of delivering software to any target environment - including production - to be a click of a button and something that can be accomplished as often as the business requires, get this book. When you employ the practices in this book, no longer will you need to artificially throttle changes delivered to users for months or even years because of the expense and risk required to deliver software.

67 of 88 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars barely ok and too repetitive January 25, 2011

By Augusto

Format:Hardcover

I found the book extremely repetitive, to the point that after the 4th chapter I started skimming through it, as there's no point in reading it all. I don't know if the idea is to repeat phrases until the reader buys into them, or what. I'm quite disappointed that Martin Fowler put his signature on this book. Maybe they're a big happy family at Thoughtworks ... and hey, they need to make money out of Go.

I don't rate this book as just 1 star, as it has some good ideas, but it could have been written in 150 pages (max) rather than 450. Some of the concepts that are repeated until boredom are:
- Don't build the binaries at each stage of the deployment pipeline, create them once an reuse them.
- The capacity testing environment should be as similar as possible to the production environment.
- Script everything!
- Don't let builds that fail unit or acceptance test into production
- Put all the configuration in version control (network, firewall, OS, etc)

I also found the book more directed to manager who don't really know or care about the technology, but want to talk "in techie" language to their engineers. There are too few examples of how to use technology to build a deployment pipeline and most of the talk stays at a very abstract level.

My bottom line, I strongly suggest to read some blog posts and watch some presentations (check infoq) about this subject, it takes less time and it's more enriching than reading this book.