Achieving Reliable High-Frequency Releases in Cloud Environments

Continuous delivery and deployment are dramatically shortening release cycles from months to hours. Cloud applications with high-frequency releases often rely heavily on automated tools and cloud infrastructure APIs to deploy new software versions. The authors report on reliability issues and how these tools and APIs contribute to them. They also analyze the trade-offs between using heavily baked and lightly baked virtual-image approaches, on the basis of experiments with Amazon Web Service OpsWorks APIs and the Chef configuration management tool. Finally, they propose error-handling practices for continuous-delivery facilities.