What Is Progressive Delivery?

How Progressive Delivery Helps DevOps Teams

Applications and their code can be improved in three major ways: faster deployment, stability of the system, and better collaboration between teams. DevOps principles and practices can help in all three areas. Progressive delivery helps development teams deploy code to production faster because it provides safeguards and control levers.
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Increasing the rate of software delivery can be done without compromising the stability of the system. This is thanks to safeguards that the operations team put into place.

Progressive delivery also helps to streamline tasks and foster greater collaboration in the software development process. Progressive delegation also helps streamline tasks and foster greater collaboration in the software development process.
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Technology is constantly changing, and if you're looking to provide your developers with the latest tools to make your organization more efficient, progressive delivery may be the answer. As a part of their DevOps transformation, many organizations are adopting modern software engineering systems like Kubernetes and microservices. Thus, progressive delivery implementation in these environments is crucial for success.
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Progressive delivery is the perfect solution for all companies. It is versatile and can be used by risk-averse enterprises to deploy infrequently, or by startups that need releases to be more regular. It also works for everyone in between. Progressive delivery gives you speed and flexibility and allows you to release whenever and to whomever, giving your customers a better experience and creating a better bottom line.

How Feature Flags Enable Progressive Delivery

It's important for teams to be able to quickly and safely make changes to their software. Requiring the use of a new system or programming method can make a team hesitant. Luckily, developers can now use a feature management tool to safely perform canary deploys to Kubernetes. They don't need to spin up multiple production instances of their app.
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Feature flags are a great way to be able to control what gets deployed when. The use of feature flags allows you to not have to change config files, do blue-green deployments, or perform rollbacks for new product features. Feature flags are a way to wrap new functionality in an application, then deploy it to just one production environment. These flags allow for the testing of new features without affecting the rest of your end-users.
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A progressive delivery deployment strategy incorporates several software engineering best practices. Use cases for progressive delivery include running canary testing, blue-green deployments, multivariate feature flagging, and A/B testing. Whether you're an enterprise that needs to deploy new services infrequently or a startup that just wants the latest version of your new software as soon as possible, progressive delivery is a software development best practice.
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If you’re testing your new feature, but the canary test fails, then you can use a kill switch to toggle the feature flag to the off position. If your monitoring, APM, or observability tool finds an issue while testing, DevCycle will disable the flag associated with it. If the canary test is successful, then you can continue to release the app to subsequent user segments. You can also choose to release the new version to a percentage of your user base.
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A feature management platform is one of the tools for conducting safe, quick, and seamless canary launches. The term “canary launch” refers to the practice of rolling out new features incrementally, starting with just a small subset of your audience. This is just one type of progressive delivery technique, which ensures quality control so you are delivering better software and value to your customers quickly, without failure.

Create A Free Account With DevCycle

DevCycle is a feature management tool that allows you to leverage feature flags to ship faster, reduce risk and maximize the impact of your feature releases. By leveraging feature toggles, you can increase your release cadence by minimizing release complexity.
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Through continuously deploying and testing in production, you can organize your feature flags in several environments with our APIs without needing to leave your workflow. Developers, product, and marketing teams can toggle a feature on or off in the DevCycle dashboard to control who has access. 
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Your DevOps engineers and product manager can also predetermine a rollout schedule to specify which subset of users have access to a new feature and at what date. This means you can create a predetermined rollout period for a release and let DevCycle gradually deploy it based on the rollout schedule to larger audiences that your team set up. 

DevCycle also enables you to maximize the impact of your canary release through zero latency experimentation build for developers. Iterate and optimize features with the ability to dynamically modify content in production without redeployments. 
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Engineering teams can employ continuous integration and continuous delivery to keep up with the competition. This practice will allow for faster development cycles, as well as the ability to deploy new features without risk of errors. Practices like progressive delivery can also help mitigate risk and ensure a better user experience.
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Want to use feature flags to start using progressive delivery to improve your software development workflow? Get started with a free trial of DevCycle.