A delivery pipeline is the thing that takes freshly written software out of the hands of a developer, and turns it into running services, potentially accessible to the public. Most (probably all) Software-as-a-Service products use a delivery pipeline.

There’s a spectrum of technologies and approaches that are used by companies, but there are two extremes.

I was explaining this to a friend the other day with an analogy.

First consider a mechanical watch.

The movement in mechanical watches are often engineering masterpieces! Craftsmen have developed this machine that has so many intricately connected moving components. The principles to get this just right have been learned over generations.

Just by looking at it, you can see its value… imagine how many hours went into to creating such an ornate mechanism!

All of that beauty comes at a price though: costs tend to rise exponentially with increased reliability and number of features. Think about how each of those components is cast, cleaned, polished, tuned, and assembled. There’s a lot of work involved in creating each watch. The sheer number of moving pieces cause risk: imagine what happens if a piece of dirt finds its way in there, or one of those screws became loose?

#sre #delivery-software #devops #opsec