Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer ExpertConfigure processes and communicationsMedium
A financial institution is developing a new online banking platform. Due to strict regulatory compliance requirements, every change to the production environment must be meticulously documented, auditable, and traceable back to a specific approval. They also need to ensure that deployments are highly reliable and can be rolled back quickly if issues arise. Which release strategy should they prioritize to meet these demands?
- ARelease Train
- BContinuous Deployment (CD)
- CContinuous Delivery (CD)
- DDark Launching
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Delivery (CD) ensures that code is always in a deployable state, ready for release at any time, but still requires a manual approval step for deployment to production. This manual gate is crucial for regulated environments to ensure compliance, documentation, and traceability before each production release, while still maintaining high readiness and potential for quick rollbacks.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A Release Train is a coordinated approach to releasing multiple interconnected products on a fixed schedule, which is a scheduling strategy rather than a mechanism for enforcing auditability and manual approval for every change.
- B. Continuous Deployment automatically deploys all changes to production after passing tests, without manual approval, which conflicts with strict regulatory audit requirements.
- D. Dark Launching involves releasing features to production but keeping them hidden from users, primarily for testing or performance monitoring, not directly a release strategy focused on regulatory compliance and manual approval.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
A software engineering approach where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for release, with a manual approval step before deployment to production.
- Code is always in a deployable state.
- Includes a manual gate for production deployment.
- Supports auditability and compliance.
- Enables frequent, reliable releases.
Memory trick: Delivery is ready, Deployment is done.