Key benefits of CD

In this section, we will look at the benefits of CD in more detail. Building upon the idea of the key characteristics of CD being speed, enabling security and progressive practices for software development, and operation and life cycle management, let’s look at the benefits.

There are some industry references. DevOps Research And Assessment (DORA) is an initiative by Google to support organizations to achieve high performance by embracing DevOps according to actionable guidance, DORA metrics (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance), which can give you a measure of the positive business outcomes from adopting CD. For us, it will be easier to map the key characteristics to the business outcomes and key benefits of CD:

Characteristics of CD	Description	Business outcome
Speed	How frequently can we release?	% gains on market shares from launching new products and services
Security	How trustworthy are we?	% reduction of the cost of risk mitigation and cost avoidance of security breaches
Agility in software development	How fast can we respond to the changing needs of the customer?	% revenue gains on the accelerated time to market for changes and new products
Simplifying software life cycle management	How resilient are we?	% gains from the cost reduction of application failures
Collaboration with software operations	How effectively do we communicate and share information between teams?	% gains from enhanced team productivity

Table 1.1 — Mapping CD characteristics to key benefits

Let us now look at the benefits of CD in the cloud.

Benefits of CD in the cloud

Taking one step forward, cloud service providers combined the benefits with the service offerings to facilitate better business outcomes:

Characteristics of CD	Business outcome	Service offering of cloud service providers
Speed	% gains on market share from launching new products and services	Automate the software delivery process through an already tested CI/CD pipeline. Improve developer productivity by removing mundane tasks.
Agility in software development	% revenue gains on accelerated time to market for changes and new products	Feature development in increments, which are discrete and small so they can be delivered with agility.
Security	% reduction of the cost of a long list of risk mitigation and cost avoidance strategies aimed at security breaches	Cloud providers offer a marketplace of security tools, which can be easily integrated with the pre-built pipelines through APIs.
Simplifying software life cycle management	% gains from the cost reduction of application failures	With managed services from cloud providers, it is easier to roll out updates. What used to take weeks and months can now be done in days or even hours.
Collaboration with software operations	% gains from enhanced team productivity	Implementing practices adopted by several organizations. Example: AWS has a number of certified DevOps Partners who can provide resources and tooling.

Table 1.2 — Mapping CD’s benefits to cloud service provider offering

In this section, you read a short overview of the CD ecosystem and how it can help you in achieving your goals. In the next sections, you will be introduced to the differences between CI and CD and where CD in the cloud can support you.