Software Engineering Institute

Competitive pressures in many domains, as well as development paradigms such as Agile and DevSecOps, have led to the increasingly common practice of continuous delivery or continuous deployment where frequent updates to software systems are rapidly and reliably fielded. In today’s systems, releases can occur at any time—possibly hundreds of releases per day—and each can be instigated by a different team within an organization. Being able to release frequently means that bug fixes and security patches do not have to wait until the next scheduled release, but rather can be made and released as soon as a bug is discovered and fixed. It also means that new features can be put into production at any time and don’t have to wait to be bundled into a release. In this podcast, Rick Kazman, an SEI visiting scientist and coauthor of Software Architecture in Practice, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about using patterns for software deployability. These patterns fall into two broad categories: complete replacement of services and canary testing.