Understanding Cloud Delivery Models

In the previous chapter, we introduced some core concepts of continuous delivery and gained insights into cloud-based implementations of it. Although we learned that there are tools in the cloud that might help us implement continuous delivery, we will briefly touch upon the characteristics of the cloud itself and how it can help us deliver our software more efficiently and conveniently. But before we do that, we’ll take a brief detour into how cloud computing changed the build/continuous integration (CI) processes in the last few years.

When companies started using CI they often started with one instance of their CI/automation server (such as Jenkins) and ran their builds directly on these servers. After some time, they might have discovered that these builds ran better in parallel and added some (more or less static) runners on virtual machines or bare metal to handle this load. As you might imagine, these pre-provisioned runners have...