Developers are under constant pressure to deliver features faster without compromising on quality or stability. Continuous deployment (CD) is a practice that can help them do just that by automating the process of pushing code changes to production.
CD is particularly well-suited for backend applications that are built to be scalable. In this article, we'll look at how CD can be used to deploy scalable backend applications and some of the benefits it offers.
Continuous deployment is a practice in which code changes are automatically pushed to production as soon as they are committed to the codebase. This means that there is never any code in the development or staging environment that is not also in production.
CD takes the concept of continuous integration (CI) one step further. With CI, code changes are automatically built and tested before being pushed to production. This offers some protection against code breakages, but it does not guarantee that the code that is pushed to production will actually work as expected.
With CD, on the other hand, code changes are pushed to production immediately after they are committed, which means that they go through the same build and release process as the code in production. This makes it much more likely that the code that is pushed to production will actually work as expected.
There are a few things that need to be in place before you can start using CD:
The continuous delivery pipeline is the key component of CD. It is responsible for taking code changes from the codebase and pushing them through the build and release process.
There are a few different ways to implement a continuous delivery pipeline, but one of the most popular is to use a tool like Jenkins. Jenkins is an open source tool that can be used to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code changes.
Once Jenkins is up and running, you can configure it to trigger a build whenever a code change is committed to the codebase. Once the build is complete, Jenkins will run the tests to ensure that the code change does not break the build. If the tests pass, Jenkins will automatically push the code change to production.
There are a few benefits that CD offers over traditional approaches to deployment:
Faster feedback: CD enables you to get feedback on code changes much faster than traditional approaches. This is because code changes are automatically pushed to production as soon as they are committed.
Reduced risk: CD also reduces the risk of code breakages. This is because code changes are automatically built and tested before they are pushed to production.
Improved quality: CD can also improve the quality of your code. This is because code changes that break the build are automatically pushed to a separate environment where they can be fixed before they are pushed to production.
CD is particularly well-suited for backend applications that are built to be scalable. This is because CD can help you avoid outages and ensure that your backend applications are always available.
When you deploy a backend application, you need to take into account the fact that it will be handling a lot of traffic. This means that you need to be careful not to break the application when you push code changes.
CD can help you avoid outages by automatically pushing code changes to a separate environment before they are pushed to production. This way, you can test the code changes in an environment that is identical to production.
If the code changes break the application, they will be automatically rolled back. This will prevent the code changes from being pushed to production and causing an outage.
CD is a practice that can help you deploy code changes faster without compromising on quality or stability. CD is particularly well-suited for backend applications that are built to be scalable. This is because CD can help you avoid outages and ensure that your backend applications are always available.