Cloud Native Java

Chapter 15. Continuous Delivery

We’ve focused in this book on building production-worthy software. We care very much about shippable software. We’ve also looked extensively at Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry, to quote Andrew Clay Shafer, is “weaponized infrastructure,” or developer-ready infrastructure, optimized for deploying and running applications. We have looked at how to get applications there, and how to build applications that take full advantage of the platform, once deployed.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at the organizational motivations for something like Cloud Foundry and the microservices architecture. We’ll look at the practice of Continuous Delivery and the application of Concourse, a technology that supports Continuous Delivery pipelines.

Beyond Continuous Integration

Let’s take a step back and look beyond software development to software deployment and release. Spring Boot makes it trivial to stand up production-worthy services. It reduces the cognitive (and actual) investment to get working software. It allows organizations to achieve results faster. Many organizations are, mercifully, also using CI (continuous integration) to give developers faster feedback about their code and their tests. What good is something like CI, Spring Boot, test-driven development, and agile software development methodologies if it takes day or weeks or months and countless ITIL tickets to get hardware provisioned and infrastructure deployed? Indeed, what good is any optimization ...