Aiming for Velocity and Reducing Delivery Risks

In Chapter 6, we learned about the technologies and tools we can use to implement our continuous delivery (CD) strategy. There are lots of technologies that will help you deliver your software in a more efficient and reproducible way. So far, we have only talked about the technical aspects, but not much about how we could get faster and at the same time reduce delivery risks.

At the beginning of this chapter, we will discuss why velocity is important, but also the associated risks when getting faster. We will also discuss how this can be measured and what DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are. After that, we will take a close look at things that can hold us back from our goal and how we might overcome such issues. Then, our path leads us toward deployment strategies—such as blue/green, canary, and rolling updates—and how they can help us achieve our goals. Then, we will learn how feature flags and chaos engineering...