Introduction

On Thursday the 19th of September I had the privilige to talk at the Kentico Connection in Brno about one of my favorite topics: Continuous Delivery. In my talk I gave a brief overview of Continuous Delivery and shared my experiences on how Continuous Delivery can be applied when you are doing Kentico development.

Key takeaways

Please find below the most important points that I wanted the attendees to take away from my talk:

• Apply a branching strategy that fits with Continuous Delivery. Examples are Trunk Based Development or GitHub flow.
• Differentiate files from code. Move media (library) files to external storage (e.g. Azure Blob Storage) and consider using a best-of-breed solution like Azure Search.
• Automate the deployment of Kentico configuration. Prevent manual and error-prone release scripts.
• Seperate the release of functionality from the actual deployment. Focus on deployable software and use feature flags (e.g. Kentico settings, Page type availability and/or settings, application/deployment slot settings etc.) to enable functionality (on demand) per environment.

Abstract and slides

This was the session description:
Have you ever had to work long hours due to a deployment that took far too long? Did you feel stressed when one of the steps in the release script didn't go as planned? If so, this is the session for you! Join Kentico MVP Jeroen Fürst in this session and learn how to set up a Continuous Delivery pipeline for your Kentico MVC website. Jeroen will introduce you to the concept and teach you techniques that reduce deployment time from several hours to mere seconds. You will leave this session with the knowledge and ability to optimize your current deployment process and to bring your features to production without breaking a sweat!

And here are the slides of my presentation: