I had an interesting conversation today where I was told, “We do great with CI but terrible at the CD part.” My immediate reaction was to point at all the great CD activity going on in vendor space right now. But as I stopped to ponder, I realized that we’re doing all of that great CD activity to play catch-up.
DevSecOps has us covered in spades—the toolsets allow for scanning and protection all through the process, from the first line of code to application retirement. I would argue that after being left out in the cold, DevSecOps has done a better job than DevOps at the right side of the equation.
In DevOps, the various “cloud-native” deployment models (I use scare quotes because they’re not really cloud-native. If you dig into them, nearly every one of them includes Kubernetes in their definition of cloud) are starting to do the job admirably, but in shops starting to automate the entirety of the process, the CI part has been automated and code delivery accelerated for a good long while.
In short, adoption seems to prove, once again, that the benefits of rapid development are more important than the benefits of offering a stable, repeatable deployment environment. This makes one wonder what, exactly, we should be doing to convince IT and business leaders in orgs smaller than web monsters that security and repeatability both demand the implementation of capable continuous delivery.
I think we failed the audience when we allowed pundits to blather on and on about deploying thousands of times a second when most applications in most orgs need to deliver at a significantly slower pace. And not only that, but want to deliver at that slower pace, given the “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” rule. Even if the environment is stable, rolling out for a single minor bug fix is possible but it’s not the best use of time—both computer and human.
But we are catching up. We have things like GitOps and Kubernetes automation catching up with the rate of development; security is already there and test automation is ready to find issues before deployment. It is simply implementation that is behind and, as time goes on, more orgs will get the implementation part nailed.
And through that process, you’ll be there, rocking it. Step up and make sure it is done right. The entire process is there; you could sleep better at night knowing that it is all in place and you are not likely to get a midnight call. Your org loves stability, you love good nights of sleep … Go out and get it.
