At QCon London, David Farley (@davefarley77) told the audience that “continuous delivery changes the economics of software delivery”. I could not agree more.
If you have been drawn to the evangelists like David Farley, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, you’ll know that high performance IT organizations are seeing a massive payoff in their continuous delivery investments. Industry leaders big and small are sharing noticeable results:
- 8x more frequent production deployments
- 50% lower change failure rates
- 12x faster service restoration times when something went wrong
5 Principles
How are they achieving these results? They are following a few key principles that David and Jez outlined in their seminal book, Continuous Delivery (highly recommended). The principles outlined in their book and in David’s QCon presentation are as follows:
- Deliver fast
- Automate almost everything
- Keep everything in version control
- Build quality In
- Empower the team
Reference Architectures for Continuous Delivery
In their book, they also provide insight to continuous delivery tool chains and processes which highlight build tools, CI platforms, testing suites, artifact repositories, and many other components. One striking image shared in his QCon presentation showed the artifact repository at the center of all things in the process and across the deployment pipeline. Perhaps your organization is already using Nexus at the center of your continuous delivery processes.
There are numerous examples of reference architectures available, and each of them vary in levels of detail, tools highlighted, and processes followed. Yet, there is a constant theme among the tool sets: Jenkins, Maven, Nexus, Subversion, Git, Docker, Puppet/Chef, Rundeck, and Sonar seem to show up time and again.
To help you along your continuous delivery journey, I have compiled a set of reference architectures created by users across the Nexus, continuous delivery, and DevOps communities. Each architecture is accompanied by a link to the original presentation or blog where the architecture was referenced to ensure you have access to the full context of the discussion.
If you have a reference architecture and discussion to share, please consider submitting it to TheNEXUS community here.
