I recently enjoyed reading Anton Weiss’ post “Let’s stop fooling ourselves. What we call CI/CD is actually only CI.” and it seemed to resonate with many of you too.
Don’t get me wrong, it is not great that in practice continuous delivery adoption is very low, but it is important to have self-awareness of what the reality of your software delivery set up is. The article also helps emphasize what we have been saying, that CI/CD as a term can be harmful, especially if you kid yourself that your continuous integration or build is all you need to do. Fun aside: check out previously unseen footage of where the term CI/CD came from:
The post has a paragraph which emphasizes for me why the Continuous Delivery Foundation exists:
“Mere mortals can’t have Continuous Delivery and even less so – Continuous Deployment. CD has become the privilege of that group that the folks at DORA quite non-accidentally call “elite performers”. And the gap between the elite and everybody else is only growing wider.”
Post: Let’s stop fooling ourselves. What we call CI/CD is actually only CI
It may feel that Continuous Delivery is out of reach, but here at CDF, we believe that every team can be a high performing team and every organization can be a high performing technology organization. And here is how we are going to make that happen.
When the DORA folks gave us ‘Elite Performing’ teams they also gave us the recipe for measuring this *and* the capabilities that we need to continuously improve at to achieve these.
Okay, so granted, building habits across your team in 24 different capabilities is a big ask, compounded by:
- A very fragmented tool landscape
- A shift in application architectures toward microservices and cloud-native architectures
- The nature of human beings to maintain the status quo
Nevertheless here’s where CDF is stepping in to make this easier, in 3 ways:
- For cloud-native continuous delivery, our open source projects Tekton and Jenkins X build in best practices and accelerate capabilities to start you off on the right foot. Here are some awesome talks to help you on your way.
- For help adopting capabilities, we are about to launch a Best Practices SIG, grounded in the Accelerate book but also tying in lessons learned from member companies like Netflix. Mark your calendars for the kick-off meeting on November 16.
- We’re also driving the future of continuous delivery aiming to simplify and drive for clarity. See what our Interoperability SIG and MLOps SIG are up to.
It takes effort and commitment to achieve true continuous delivery—but it is not out of reach. Plus there are open-source tools and CDF communities willing to help you get there. But we can’t help anyone who thinks they have arrived. So the first step is simply accepting reality—as a team—of where you are in your continuous delivery journey.
