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Grokking Continuous Delivery
Build and use systems that safely automate software delivery from testing through release with this jargon-busting guide to Continuous Delivery pipelines.
In Grokking Continuous Delivery you will learn how
Design effective CD pipelines for new and legacy projects
Keep your software projects release-ready
Maintain effective tests
Scale CD across multiple applications
Ensure pipelines give the right signals at the right time
Use version control as the source of truth
Safely automate deployments with metrics
Describe CD in a way that makes sense to your colleagues
Grokking Continuous Delivery teaches you the design and purpose of continuous delivery systems that you can use with any language or stack. You’ll learn directly from your mentor Christie Wilson, Google engineer and co-creator of the Tekton CI/CD framework. Using crystal-clear, well-illustrated examples, Christie lays out the practical nuts and bolts of continuous delivery for developers and pipeline designers. In each chapter, you’ll uncover the proper approaches to solve the real-world challenges of setting up a CD pipeline. With this book as your roadmap, you’ll have a clear plan for bringing CD to your team without the need for costly trial-and-error experimentation.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
About the technology
Keep your codebase release-ready. A continuous delivery pipeline automates version control, testing, and deployment with minimal developer intervention. Master the tools and practices of continuous delivery, and you’ll be able to add features and push updates quickly and consistently.
About the book
Grokking Continuous Delivery is a friendly guide to setting up and working with a continuous delivery pipeline. Each chapter takes on a different scenario you’ll face when setting up a CD system, with real-world examples like automated scaling and testing legacy applications. Taking a tool-agnostic approach, author Christie Wilson guides you each step of the way with illustrations, crystal-clear explanations, and practical exercises to lock in what you’re learning.
What's inside
Design effective CD pipelines for new and legacy projects
Ensure your pipelines give the right signals at the right times
Version control as the source of truth
Safely automate deployments
About the reader
For software engineers who want to add CD to their development process.
About the author
Christie Wilson is a software engineer at Google, where she co-created Tekton, a cloud-native CI/CD platform built on Kubernetes.
Table of Contents
PART 1 Introducing continuous delivery
1 Welcome to Grokking Continuous Delivery
2 A basic pipeline
PART 2 Keeping software in a deliverable state at all times
3 Version control is the only way to roll
4 Use linting effectively
5 Dealing with noisy tests
6 Speeding up slow test suites
7 Give the right signals at the right times
PART 3 Making delivery easy
8 Easy delivery starts with version control
9 Building securely and reliably
10 Deploying confidently
PART 4 CD design
11 Starter From zero to CD
12 Scripts are code, too
13 Pipeline design
In Grokking Continuous Delivery you will learn how
Design effective CD pipelines for new and legacy projects
Keep your software projects release-ready
Maintain effective tests
Scale CD across multiple applications
Ensure pipelines give the right signals at the right time
Use version control as the source of truth
Safely automate deployments with metrics
Describe CD in a way that makes sense to your colleagues
Grokking Continuous Delivery teaches you the design and purpose of continuous delivery systems that you can use with any language or stack. You’ll learn directly from your mentor Christie Wilson, Google engineer and co-creator of the Tekton CI/CD framework. Using crystal-clear, well-illustrated examples, Christie lays out the practical nuts and bolts of continuous delivery for developers and pipeline designers. In each chapter, you’ll uncover the proper approaches to solve the real-world challenges of setting up a CD pipeline. With this book as your roadmap, you’ll have a clear plan for bringing CD to your team without the need for costly trial-and-error experimentation.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
About the technology
Keep your codebase release-ready. A continuous delivery pipeline automates version control, testing, and deployment with minimal developer intervention. Master the tools and practices of continuous delivery, and you’ll be able to add features and push updates quickly and consistently.
About the book
Grokking Continuous Delivery is a friendly guide to setting up and working with a continuous delivery pipeline. Each chapter takes on a different scenario you’ll face when setting up a CD system, with real-world examples like automated scaling and testing legacy applications. Taking a tool-agnostic approach, author Christie Wilson guides you each step of the way with illustrations, crystal-clear explanations, and practical exercises to lock in what you’re learning.
What's inside
Design effective CD pipelines for new and legacy projects
Ensure your pipelines give the right signals at the right times
Version control as the source of truth
Safely automate deployments
About the reader
For software engineers who want to add CD to their development process.
About the author
Christie Wilson is a software engineer at Google, where she co-created Tekton, a cloud-native CI/CD platform built on Kubernetes.
Table of Contents
PART 1 Introducing continuous delivery
1 Welcome to Grokking Continuous Delivery
2 A basic pipeline
PART 2 Keeping software in a deliverable state at all times
3 Version control is the only way to roll
4 Use linting effectively
5 Dealing with noisy tests
6 Speeding up slow test suites
7 Give the right signals at the right times
PART 3 Making delivery easy
8 Easy delivery starts with version control
9 Building securely and reliably
10 Deploying confidently
PART 4 CD design
11 Starter From zero to CD
12 Scripts are code, too
13 Pipeline design
300 pages, Paperback
Published November 8, 2022
16 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 22, 2025
This book taught me several practical lessons on how CD really works. At its core, CD means keeping software releasable at all times and making releases simple and predictable.
One big takeaway was how much velocity relies on trunk-based development. Long-lived branches feel safer, but they create more risk by drifting from the main branch and turning merges into slow, painful events. Integrating small changes constantly gives faster feedback and reduces surprises. To make that safe, basic CI checks aren’t enough. A merge queue is essential because it validates changes in the exact order they’ll land, catching the integration bugs that only appear when two clean PRs collide. This directly improves the DORA velocity metrics: deployment frequency and lead time for changes.
Another lesson was the importance of test suite hygiene. A flaky test, which is one that passes sometimes and fails other times without any code change, adds noise and erodes trust in the pipeline. Treating flakes as real bugs is crucial. The book reinforced leaning on the test pyramid so most tests are fast unit tests, and using sharding to spread slower tests across multiple machines to keep feedback quick. Stable, isolated test environments also matter so results don’t depend on who runs the suite or where it runs.
On the deployment side, the big idea is that stability comes from recovering quickly, not from trying to avoid failure altogether. That starts with making builds repeatable by pinning dependencies to exact hashes. It also means treating build scripts like real software. Once the logic grows beyond a few shell commands, using something like Python makes the pipeline easier to understand and maintain. Another key point is keeping artifacts immutable, that is build them once, then promote the same artifact through testing, staging, and production. And finally, using blue-green or canary deployments makes rollbacks take minutes instead of days, improving the other DORA metrics: change failure rate and time to restore service.
My main takeaway from the book: design systems so you get clear, reliable signals as early and as quickly as possible, and address the pain points that slow those signals down. A highly recommended read for any DevOps engineer.
One big takeaway was how much velocity relies on trunk-based development. Long-lived branches feel safer, but they create more risk by drifting from the main branch and turning merges into slow, painful events. Integrating small changes constantly gives faster feedback and reduces surprises. To make that safe, basic CI checks aren’t enough. A merge queue is essential because it validates changes in the exact order they’ll land, catching the integration bugs that only appear when two clean PRs collide. This directly improves the DORA velocity metrics: deployment frequency and lead time for changes.
Another lesson was the importance of test suite hygiene. A flaky test, which is one that passes sometimes and fails other times without any code change, adds noise and erodes trust in the pipeline. Treating flakes as real bugs is crucial. The book reinforced leaning on the test pyramid so most tests are fast unit tests, and using sharding to spread slower tests across multiple machines to keep feedback quick. Stable, isolated test environments also matter so results don’t depend on who runs the suite or where it runs.
On the deployment side, the big idea is that stability comes from recovering quickly, not from trying to avoid failure altogether. That starts with making builds repeatable by pinning dependencies to exact hashes. It also means treating build scripts like real software. Once the logic grows beyond a few shell commands, using something like Python makes the pipeline easier to understand and maintain. Another key point is keeping artifacts immutable, that is build them once, then promote the same artifact through testing, staging, and production. And finally, using blue-green or canary deployments makes rollbacks take minutes instead of days, improving the other DORA metrics: change failure rate and time to restore service.
My main takeaway from the book: design systems so you get clear, reliable signals as early and as quickly as possible, and address the pain points that slow those signals down. A highly recommended read for any DevOps engineer.
May 17, 2024
This was an example of a right book at the right time. I was trying to streamline and speed up the release of the software I produce, and I got so many valuable tips from this book. The author takes a very incremental approach and focus on solving real-world problems one at a time: how to deal with legacy codebases where fixing linting rules would take forever, how to speed up test suites, how to cath bugs as early as possible. After reading every chapter, I immediately setup what she suggests and I'm felling much more confident at my work. The writing style is very fluid without assuming the reader is dumb.
January 2, 2024
Really good book. Learnt a lot as a beginner. Would rate it 4.5. Would have been 5 if the chapter 3 was explained more clearly. I
April 29, 2023
CI/CD are highly important concepts in modern software development. This title is an excellent starting point!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews