Continuous Delivery

The foundational technical guide to building deployment pipelines that make software releases reliable, repeatable, and low-risk. Humble and Farley introduce the deployment pipeline concept and show how to automate every step from code commit to production release.

Why Start Here

Continuous Delivery is Humble’s most original and influential work. While Accelerate and The DevOps Handbook were collaborative efforts with other prominent authors, Continuous Delivery is where Humble (with co-author David Farley) first articulated the ideas that would reshape how the industry thinks about software releases. The book argues that every software change should be releasable at any time, and it lays out in detail the technical practices that make this possible.

Published in 2010, the book predates the DevOps movement’s mainstream breakthrough and helped create the intellectual foundation for it. The deployment pipeline pattern it describes, automating the path from version control to production through build, test, and release stages, is now standard practice in the industry. Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award.

What to Expect

A 463-page technical book that covers configuration management, build automation, testing strategies, deployment pipelines, and release management. The writing is clear but assumes familiarity with software development. This is a book for practitioners who want to understand and implement continuous delivery at a deep level.