Every company developing a mobile app wants fast, efficient, and secure software updates. With a Continuous Delivery Model, these goals are easier to achieve than ever before.

What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Delivery is simply a strategy to make deployments as speedy and secure as possible by automatically pushing updates and code changes between environments. To practice Continuous Delivery, make sure that your software is always ready for a rapid release at any point. That means that at all steps of the development process, your team needs to prioritize core function over cool new features. However, the most important feature of a Continuous Delivery Model is that software must be deployable at a moment’s notice. To meet this goal, check out the principles and best practices on the Continuous Delivery website. They brilliantly detail how working in small batches and heavily automating repetitive processes will improve your model.

Benefits

Continuous Delivery is designed to maximize efficiency without harming security. Here are a few of the most direct benefits.

Lower Risk

If you deploy a large update and something goes wrong, your team may have to spend countless hours searching for the error before they even begin trying to fix it. However, frequent small updates make errors much smaller and easier to solve, especially if you automatically test the code before deployment.

Faster Deployment

Sometimes the market moves faster than your development team. However, if you release new features more frequently in their minimum viable state, you get more feedback and can respond to customer demand more rapidly.

Minimal Downtime

Zero downtime deployments are the crown jewel of the Continuous Delivery Model. When you develop your code to be deployable at any point, you can automate parts of the deployment process and release updates without any downtime.

Industry Applications

Companies should consider Continuous Delivery regardless of industry. However, if you’re working on an app in one of these three fields, you should take extra care not to overlook what the model can do for you.

Financial Systems

Security and speed are the name of the game in the world of computerized finance. That’s why every update needs to be instantaneous and flawless. The only model that can keep up with the ever-changing industry is Continuous Delivery. By automating repeatable processes and deployment pipelines, developers can deploy software without downtime or trouble.

Capital One took these exact steps when they implemented their own Continuous Delivery Model. As a result, their deployment frequency grew by a whopping 1300%. Instead of deploying a few times every year, they now release updates once every two weeks. Best of all, the increased automation boosted security by cutting out human error. The applications of this model in the financial industry are limitless.

Streaming Services

Downtime poses a huge problem for streaming services. After all, your 11th rewatch of The Office shouldn’t be interrupted just because Jerry from IT accidentally crashed the system. That’s exactly why Netflix developed Spinnaker: a platform that automates routine tasks and simplifies deployment. This program gives Netflix ample flexibility to test and deploy code without downtime, but any streaming service or entertainment platform would benefit from similar Continuous Delivery.

Healthcare Apps

Between rigorous regulations and stringent security standards, healthcare companies cannot cut corners when developing infrastructure. That’s where continuous delivery: automated deployments are also stable deployments. Automation also provides faster feedback, meaning that teams can more rapidly respond to bugs before they jeopardize sensitive patient data. And if you can deploy software faster, you can easily keep up with regulations. Any healthcare business with a high volume of sensitive data and demand for frequent security updates would benefit from Continuous Delivery

Mistakes to Avoid

A Continuous Delivery Model can save your company time, effort, and money, but only if you implement it correctly. Steer clear of these three common mistakes at all costs.

Using Slow Pipelines

The entire Continuous Delivery Model is built around rapid updates and frequent feedback. So if your deployment pipeline has too many steps, your team loses the ability to instantly respond to changes, which defeats the entire point.

Ignoring Metrics

What’s the point of preparing for frequent updates if you don’t track the details? Too many companies lack sufficient logging and metrics. That makes tracking the operations of your software completely unreliable.

Avoiding the Right Culture

No team can be ready to deploy software at any moment if they do not share an agreed definition of “deployable.” Thus, collaboration and communication are crucial to building an agile workspace. Without frequent feedback, a Continuous Delivery Model cannot thrive.

Want to learn more about how to develop a mobile application? Check out Fyresite’s 8-step development process or reach out for a chat.