Progressive Delivery vs Continuous Delivery | Complete Guide

What is Progressive Delivery?

Progressive Delivery is a software development approach that involves releasing new features or updates to an application in a controlled and gradual manner rather than deploying all changes simultaneously. Its aims to reduce the risk of releasing new features or updates that could negatively impact the user experience by carefully monitoring and testing the changes before releasing them to all users.

In this new feature or update is initially deployed to a small subset of users, known as a "canary group." This group is selected based on specific criteria, such as location, demographics, or behavior patterns. The new feature or update is then closely monitored and tested to ensure it works as expected and does not cause issues or bugs.

A web app that uses service workers, manifests, and other web platform features combined with progressive extensions. Taken From Article, Progressive Web App Development and Architecture

If the new feature or update is stable and prosperous, it can be gradually rolled out to a larger group of users and eventually to all users. However, if any issues are detected during the testing phase, the deployment can be stopped or rolled back to a previous version to minimize user impact.

Using it, developers can release updates to an application more frequently and with less risk, allowing them to respond quickly to user feedback and adapt to changing requirements. This approach helps ensure a better user experience, crucial for customer satisfaction and retention.

The benefits of progressive delivery include faster delivery of new features, improved user experience, and reduced risk of errors or disruptions. However, it can also be more complex and time-consuming than traditional release approaches and requires careful planning and monitoring to ensure success.

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What are the core tenets of Progressive Delivery?

It is a software development approach that involves releasing new features or updates to an application in a controlled and gradual manner. The core tenets of it are:

1. Canary Releasing: It starts with a canary release, where the new feature or update is deployed to a small subset of users to test and monitor its performance. This allows developers to identify any issues or bugs and fix them before releasing the update to a larger audience.
2. Incremental Rollout: It uses an incremental rollout approach, where the new feature or update is gradually released to a larger group of users. This enables developers to identify any bugs that may have been missed during the canary release and fix them before releasing the update to all users.
3. Feature Flags: Feature flags are used to control the release of new features or updates to different groups of users. This allows developers to test and monitor the new feature or update in a controlled manner and ensure that it works as expected before releasing it to all users.
4. Continuous Monitoring: Progressive Delivery requires continuous monitoring of the new feature or update to ensure that it is working as expected and is not causing any issues or bugs. Monitoring can include user feedback, performance metrics, and error logs.
5. Continuous Rollback: If any issues or bugs are detected during the canary release or incremental rollout, it allows continuous rollback to a previous application version. This ensures that the application remains stable and reliable for all users.
6. Minimizing Risk: It minimizes the risk of releasing new features or updates by rolling them out gradually and monitoring feedback and metrics. This allows developers to catch and fix the bug before they affect the entire user base. Using feature flags and canary releases, developers can quickly roll back changes if necessary.
7. Faster Time to Market: By gradually releasing new features or updates, developers can get feedback from users in real time and make adjustments as needed. This can lead to a faster time to market for new features or updates, as developers can quickly make improvements based on user feedback.
8. Improved User Experience: It can improve user experience by allowing developers to test and refine new features or updates in a real-world environment. By monitoring user feedback and metrics, developers can quickly identify and fix issues impacting the user experience.
9. More Complex Release Process: It can be more complex and time-consuming than traditional releases, requiring careful planning and monitoring. Developers need to be able to track which features are enabled for which users and monitor feedback and metrics to ensure that the changes have the desired effect.
10. Requires Investment in Infrastructure: It often requires investment in infrastructure such as feature flags, canary releases, and A/B testing tools. This investment can be costly but can lead to long-term benefits in faster delivery of new features and improved user experience.

Overall, the core tenets of it focus on reducing the risk of releasing new features or updates to an application by testing and monitoring the new feature or update before releasing it to all users. This approach helps to ensure a better user experience and improves customer satisfaction and retention.

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What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice in which developers automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software to production. It reduces the time between writing new code and making it available to end-users in a production environment while minimizing the risk of introducing errors or issues.

Workflow of Continuous Delivery

• In it code changes are frequently committed to a code repository, and the build process is automated to ensure that the code can be built and tested consistently. This helps identify issues early in the development cycle and ensures that the code works as expected before being released to production.
• Once the code has passed all the automated tests, it is automatically deployed to a staging environment where it can be tested in an environment that closely resembles the production environment. This ensures that the code works as expected and that any issues or bugs are identified before being released to end users. Finally, the code is automatically deployed to production in a controlled and gradual manner, using techniques such as canary releasing or feature flags to minimize the risk of introducing errors or issues to end-users.
• It is often combined with other practices, such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), to create its pipeline. Continuous Integration involves the automatic building and testing of new code changes, while Continuous Deployment involves the automatic deployment of those changes to the production environment.

Overall, it is a powerful software development practice that enables organizations to release new features and updates to their applications quickly and reliably while minimizing the risk of introducing errors or issues to end users.

The primary purpose of continuous Testing is to check the quality of the software as a part of the continuous delivery process. Taken From Article, Role of Continuous Testing in Continuous Delivery

What are the core tenets of Continuous Delivery?

Here are some fresh insights on the core tenets are described below:

• Continuous Integration: Continuous Integration (CI) is a fundamental practice in Continuous Delivery. It involves regularly merging code changes into a shared repository and automatically building, testing, and validating them. This enables developers to catch and fix issues early in the development cycle, reducing the risk of defects and conflicts later on.
• Continuous Deployment: Continuous Deployment (CD) automatically releases code changes to production environments as soon as the CI process validates them. This enables teams to deliver new features and bug fixes to users more frequently and reliably. To minimize risk, CD is often accompanied by techniques such as feature flags, canary releases, and automated rollbacks.
• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice that involves defining and managing infrastructure resources such as servers, networks, and databases using code. This enables teams to automate their infrastructure's provisioning, configuration, and management, reducing the risk of manual errors and inconsistencies.
• Monitoring and Observability: It relies heavily on monitoring and observability tools to detect and diagnose real-time issues. This enables teams to identify and address issues quickly, minimizing the impact on users and business operations. Monitoring can also provide valuable insights into usage patterns and performance metrics, enabling teams to optimize their software for a better user experience.
• DevOps Culture: It requires a strong culture emphasizing collaboration, communication, and shared ownership of the delivery pipeline. This involves breaking down silos between development, testing, and operations teams and promoting a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, and learning.
• Security and Compliance: These are critical considerations in it, especially in regulated industries such as finance and healthcare. Teams must implement security testing and compliance checks throughout the delivery process and ensure the software meets relevant regulatory standards.

These core tenets of Continuous Delivery enable teams to deliver high-quality software more quickly, reliably, and securely. By automating and streamlining the delivery process, teams can focus on delivering value to users and business stakeholders while minimizing the risk of errors and downtime.

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Progressive Delivery VS Continuous Delivery

Here are some insights on Progressive Delivery vs. Continuous Delivery:

• Progressive Delivery and Continuous Delivery are software development practices that aim to streamline the software delivery process and minimize the risk of introducing issues into production environments. However, there are some critical differences between the two approaches.
• Continuous Delivery is focused on automating and optimizing the entire software delivery process, from code changes to production deployment. This involves using tools and techniques such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, and infrastructure as code to automate the build, test, and deployment process. Its aims to enable teams to deliver high-quality software more quickly and reliably while minimizing the risk of introducing errors or issues to end users.
• On the other hand, Progressive Delivery is a more advanced version of it, that focuses on gradually rolling out new features and changes to users while minimizing the risk of adverse impacts. It involves using techniques such as feature flags, canary releases, and A/B testing to roll out changes to a small subset of users or environments before gradually expanding to a broader audience. This enables teams to validate new features and changes in a controlled environment before rolling them out more broadly.
• Another critical difference between Progressive Delivery and Continuous Delivery is that it places a greater emphasis on collaboration between development, testing, and operations teams. This involves breaking down silos and promoting a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement. By working together more closely, teams can identify and address issues more quickly and ensure that the software meets the needs of users and business stakeholders.

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• Overall, while it is focused on streamlining the software delivery process, It is focused on rolling out new features and changes in a controlled and optimized manner. By using techniques such as feature flags, canary releases, and A/B testing, teams can minimize the risk of adverse impacts and ensure that the software meets the needs of users and business stakeholders.

1. Release Strategy: It involves a phased approach to releasing new features or updates, whereas it emphasizes frequent and continuous releases. Progressive delivery aims to minimize risk by rolling out changes gradually and monitoring feedback and metrics before fully releasing them to all users. In contrast, continuous delivery aims to speed up the delivery process by automating as much of the process as possible.
2. Risk Management: It emphasizes risk management more than continuous delivery. By first rolling out changes to a small subset of users and monitoring feedback and metrics, developers can catch and fix issues before affecting the entire user base. It relies more heavily on automated testing and quality assurance processes to catch and fix issues before they are released to production.
3. Focus: It focuses on delivering new features or updates quickly while minimizing risk, while continuous delivery focuses on speed and efficiency in the development process. Its aims to provide a better user experience by delivering new features quickly and with minimal disruption. In contrast, Its aims to shorten the time between development and release to enable faster feedback loops and reduce the overall time to market.

In practice, the choice between progressive delivery and continuous delivery often depends on the development team's needs and the product or service being developed. Both approaches can be effective in improving the delivery of software changes, and they can also be used together in a hybrid approach to balance speed, risk, and quality.

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Conclusion  

In conclusion, Progressive Delivery and Continuous Delivery have their benefits and drawbacks, and the choice of which approach to use will depend on the specific needs of a given project. Continuous Delivery is better suited for projects where rapid deployment is a priority, while Progressive Delivery is better suited for projects where risk mitigation and user feedback are essential considerations. Ultimately, the best approach will depend on the project scope, timeline, and team resources. 

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