Continuous delivery is a rapidly evolving field. New trends that will drive it forward in 2023 include self-serve developer environments, edge computing, and an everything-as-code approach, says Gilad David Maayan, CEO and founder of Agile SEO.
What Is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery is a software development approach in which code changes are automatically staged for production deployment. It is a pillar of modern application development, which extends continuous integration by automatically deploying all code changes to test and production environments immediately after the build phase. It ensures developers always generate deployable build artifacts that have passed a standardized testing process.
Continuous delivery allows developers to go beyond unit and automated testing to verify many other aspects of software releases before deploying them to customers. These tests may include UI tests, load tests, integration tests, API stability tests, and more. This allows developers to validate updates more thoroughly and proactively identify and prevent issues in production environments.
Continuous Delivery Trends and Technologies
Here are some key trends and technologies that will move continuous delivery forward in 2023 and beyond.
Everything as Code
Software development has long adopted “continuous” development practices, and other teams in the DevOps organization are starting to follow suit. Expressing something as code allows teams to automate their processes and improve efficiency. Here are a few examples:
- Database changes can be expressed as code, making it possible to push schema changes from the repository to the production database with the same confidence as developers push their code.
- Teams that maintain machine learning (ML) data and models are exploring the same approach, using concepts such as machine learning operations (MLOps).
- Security teams treat policies as code, making it possible to enforce and update policies across the organization automatically.
Software Supply Chain Attacks
A software supply chain attack occurs when malicious actors infiltrate a software vendor’s network and compromise a software build before the vendor delivers it to its customers. Malicious actors can exploit open-source vulnerabilities, such as Log4Shell, and use them to damage customer data or IT systems.
One of the reasons for the increase in cyber attacks on the software supply chain is the increased velocity of software development and faster release cycles. As organizations accelerate software development cycles to stay competitive, security vulnerabilities can find their way into production applications because developers don’t have time to find and fix them.
These attacks can leave organizations vulnerable, even if their cybersecurity defenses are strong because they exploit weak security controls of trusted third parties within their software supply chain.
Organizations must monitor the entire software development lifecycle to identify vulnerabilities and prepare for future software supply chain attacks. Organizations need to shift security left to determine if software development processes are at risk – this means performing security testing and software configuration analysis early in the software development lifecycle. But this is not enough because there is also the risk that threats will penetrate running applications. Therefore, there is also a need to shift right – investigate and remediate vulnerabilities during runtime in production applications.
See More: Supply Chain Security Holes: What You Should Know
Self-Serve Developer Environments
Fast-growing development teams are making increasing use of self-service or branching environments. These platforms are often based on version control branches. A build or SaaS process triggers the creation of a staging environment and infrastructure build, and any code changes require re-running the entire test suite. The environment is destroyed when the test run is complete.
The important thing with this approach is that dozens of these temporary environments can appear and disappear at the same time. There is no need to block team members or maintain long-running test environments that require regular maintenance. This change can significantly improve developer productivity.
Observability
A major focus of continuous delivery is to deliver software faster. But not all organizations need to release hourly like the tech giants. For most companies, standardization, stability, flexibility, and continuity are more important than speed.
Because of the excessive focus on speed, some organizations might push development velocity too far. This can lead to more undetected errors, and despite investments in monitoring and troubleshooting tools, businesses can experience application instability, bugs, outages, and security issues.
Addressing this combination of challenges requires infrastructure, operations, and development teams to rethink how applications and services are managed. Visibility into all aspects of software development builds and deployments is critical for managing cloud-native or microservices-oriented applications.
To address these challenges, observability is getting more sophisticated. Monitoring, analytics, and telemetry tools are becoming part of the CD pipeline. Technologies like OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing are solutions to these problems and should be included in the development and software delivery process. eBPF is also gaining momentum and impacting how teams monitor and deliver software.
See More: Operational Intelligence and Business Observability in Action
Edge Computing
To reduce latency and save bandwidth, edge computing seeks to move processing and data storage closer to the data source. Edge devices are often IoT devices, but what makes an IoT device is constantly evolving.
It is more important than ever for development teams to ensure that these devices have the latest versions of programs and services. Several services can help with edge delivery, and new tools and plugins for existing pipelines, including CI/CD pipelines, are likely to emerge.
Continuous Improvement
In conclusion, continuous delivery is a rapidly evolving field driven by trends and technologies that aim to accelerate the software delivery process and enable organizations to release new features and updates to their customers more quickly and reliably.
Some key trends and technologies in this field include self-serve developer environments, edge computing, and an everything-as-code approach. These trends and technologies are helping to shape the future of continuous delivery and are enabling organizations to become more agile and responsive to changing business needs and customer demands.
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