Texto muito interessante sobre “deploy contínuo”. Seria o próximo passo depois de se alcançar a “integração contínua”.
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/02/continuous-deployment-and-continuous.html
A idéia é bem simples (o destaque é meu):
The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat.
Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. That’s 6 deploys an hour. Even at that pace we’re often batching multiple commits into a single test/push cycle. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day.
We call this process continuous deployment because it seemed to us like a natural extension of the continuous integration we were already doing. Our eventual conclusion was that there was no reason to have code that had passed the integration step but was not yet deployed.