Continuous Delivery overview
Read how CD works on Shippable and what is supported. Learn how to configure your Continuous Delivery workflows and use our various third party integrations to connect the tools you already use and love.
The problem
Are you happy with how quickly your new products and features can be released to customers? If you're like most businesses, the answer is likely No. The main reason for it is the friction that exists in your software delivery process.
In most organizations the friction is because deployments to different environments are manual and require some team to provision/update the environment as needed, deploy a specific version of the software, and keep track of what is running where. This manual process creates a dependency on people being available to work on this at all times and on them never making mistakes. Teams also struggle with a lack of visibility about what version of the application is running in each environment, making testing, bug fixing, and release management more challenging.
This process is repeated every time you want to update production and is error prone, wasteful, and adds no value to your customers. Ultimately, these inefficiencies will lead to slower releases and lost revenue and opportunities.
The solution: Continuous Delivery
The best way to address this problem is with a software development best practice called Continuous Delivery (CD). All steps of the deployment pipeline are automated and every code change is tested all the way so that can be deployed if required. This goes way beyond simple CI since functional tests and acceptance tests are also automated as part of this workflow, which means every code change will reach your pre-production environment in an automated fashion. You might still not choose to deploy every code change to production, but since it is tested to a point where it can be deployed if necessary, you're going to find most bugs and problems along the way.
This practice leads to rapid releases that are predictable, error free, which in turn leads to happy and more productive engineering teams. Shippable helps you achieve Continuous Delivery by giving you a platform to automate your delivery pipelines. Some highlights are:
- Creation of versioned manifests so you can easily keep track of what application version is running in each environment. The same version is deployed to successive environments thus ensuring a consistent way to talk about application versions and reducing confusion.
- Promotion of version manifests through a series of environments like Dev, Test, Staging, and Production with the ability to choose automated promotion or manual approval workflows. You can also trigger different test suites for each environment and make decisions based on the results.
- Flexible deployment to any cloud. You can deploy your manifests to any supported CaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. We also support all deployment strategies like blue-green, upgrade, replace, etc.
