Continuous Delivery Architect (CDA)

Continuous Delivery Architect (CDA) – “The Role”

Continuous Delivery Architects are engaged in the design, implementation, and management of DevOps deployment pipelines. This infers the inclusion of all tools and tech to support Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, and even Continuous Deployment.

Subjective viewpoints and misunderstandings of what is involved and how to orchestrate a pipeline can lead an entire organization in the wrong direction. Every “Continuous Delivery Architect” should consider formal education and certification to ensure that they do not proceed in error.

I see in practice that the emphasis is on the tooling and although that is a key element, even more critical is the process flow, the APIs, and the inclusion of practices to ensure things like security, compliance, and resilience are built into the orchestrated automated pipeline. Let us not forget the importance of CULTURE and the role that plays.

There are three primary ingredients for continuous delivery:

Automated configuration management – to be able to stand up a machine and software with one command

Continuous integration – automate builds, tests of builds, and fast recovery of the trunk when failures are detected

Automated testing – tests help to prove whether a release candidate is NOT ready for production and if problems do occur in production then tests are improved

Architecture affects continuous delivery in many ways including

Testability
Deployability
Reliability

The CDA must have a broad understanding and a holistic perspective and at the same time seek to learn the ecosystems of people, processes, and technologies that produce business and customer outcomes.

Shatter the silos! If you are an architect and you have DevOps Foundation certification, be sure to take the next step with your CDA education to move your organization and the world forward!

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