[DL.CD.5] Ensure on-demand deployment capabilities

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Continuous delivery relies on the ability to ensure that every change is considered deliverable and can be deployed to production environments at any time. While the actual decision to deploy to production may still be manual, deployments should be able to occur on-demand as needed.

Deployments should be able to occur during normal working hours without causing significant downtime or disruption to the business. Changes should not require synchronization with other systems and deployments should be able to occur regardless of the interdependence of other systems. By decoupling deployments from other systems and being able to perform them during normal business hours, teams can receive fast feedback and respond to any issues that arise, leading to quicker fixes and less disruption to users.

To enable on-demand deployments, teams should employ advanced deployment strategies, such as blue/green deployments, canary releases, feature flags, or rolling updates. The ability to gradually roll out changes, coupled with modern application architectures and integrated QA processes, enables iterative delivery. Iterative delivery reduces the impact of potential issues throughout the deployment and allows for quick rollback if necessary. By using the right tools and strategies, deployments can be automated and run seamlessly, allowing for faster and more efficient delivery of applications and services.

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