Many companies have rushed to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to streamline their software development workflows. Far fewer have taken the additional step to automate continuous deployment, a practice of using CI/CD pipelines to push changes into production continuously. Understandably so.
The thought of pushing code to production as frequently as daily or hourly gives me the chills. In fact, several years ago, I wrote an article about the downsides of continuous deployment. Another article, “When should responsible devops teams increase deployment frequency,” challenges the assumption that more frequent deployments are better.