Continuous Deployment Resources

Between one and two years ago Continuous Deployment seemed to have a lot of buzz, whether it was praise or condemnation. Now seems to be the period after the storm. Continuous Deployment has been proven by the likes of Flickr, Facebook, Etsy, IMVU, and Wealthfront, to name a few.

This blog post is simply a categorized list of links and resources to learn more about continuous deployment. Unlike a traditional blog post, I’ll likely be updating this over time much as I find more resources.

Updated: February 7, 2013

Note: Somtimes continuous deployment is also referred to as continuous delivery.

Last Updated: February 1, 2013

Presentations

For a while, Continuous Deployment was a popular subject for talks and presentations. Here’s a short list of what I have found so far.

ArchCamp Meetup on March 30, 2012

The topic for the lightning talks at ArchCamp on March 30, 2012 was Continuous Deployment. There’s not a lot of detail on the Meetup.com page itself but there are a few presentations listed including the one listed below.

• ArchCamp Continuous Deployment Meetup
• 3 Reasons You Should be Using Continuous Deployment

Companies Using Continuous Deployment

Various companies have written about how they have implemented continuous deployment in their organization.

IMVU

IMVU has been using continuous deployment techniques for years and was an early proponent.

• Continuous Deployment by Timothy Fitz
• Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day

Wealthfront

Wealthfront was previously known as kaChing and is a financial services startup that users continuous deployment.

• Deployment Infrastructure for Continuous Deployment
• DevOps Cafe on Continuous Deployment and Operations Dashboards at kaChing 
• All Continuous Deployment bog posts

Etsy

Etsy is another large user of continuous deployment.

• How Does Etsy Manage Development and Operations
  
• Quantum of Deployment

Flickr

Flickr uses what I think is one of the most important pieces in the continuous deployment puzzle: feature flags (Flickr calls them flippers). It also seems to be one of the least written about best practices for continuous deployment, yet it can make life so much easier for the team.

• Flipping Out
  

Facebook

Although it never is explicitly mentioned, Facebook definitely uses continuous deployment techniques: rolling features incrementally, continuous integration, automated testing, and push button deployment.

• Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering
• Push: Tech Talk- May 26, 2011 (Video)
• How Facebook ships code
• Quora: How does Facebook site release/deploy process work?

Empower Campaigns

Empower had implemented an full continuous deployment pipeline and used “extreme feedback” to keep track of it all.

• Extreme Feedback

Open Source Software

Continuous Integration

• Jenkins
• Travis CI
• CruiseControl

Automatic or push button deployment

• Deployinator

Continuous Deployment Services

Several as a service companies have emerged over the past year or more.

• Tddium
• Codeship
• Drone.io
• CircleCI (despite the name they also do deployment)
• Wercker
• Cloudbees

Books

There are also a couple of book on the subject. I have read and own a copy of only the first book on this list.

• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley
  
• Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Quickstart guide by Paul Swartout

More Links

There are a few fairly decent Quora topics on the subject of continuous deployment.

• What are best examples of companies using continuous deployment?

One of the authors of Continuous Delivery also has a website and blog dedicated to the subject.

• ContinuousDelivery.com