Why Releasing Is Not Deploying: How to Achieve More With Less

In the current world, it is more important than ever to be as efficient and prudent as possible as an organization. In other words, doing more with less will be the holy grail of digital transformation even more than it already is. The most common reason companies are moving to cloud native and decentralized architectures is to improve the maintainability of their applications. This improved maintainability can typically be measured by releasing more - and better-performing - features in less time.

But why is moving to a microservices architecture often not achieving this promise of being able to deliver more and better features in less time? Even though the monolith has been sliced up into several microservices, the delivery pipeline is still monolithic in its design and implementation. This cancels the potential of increased delivery speed by decoupling.

An interesting solution for this challenge is to differentiate between technical deploying and business- and user-focused release processes. The moment you extend a technical deployment pipeline with user-focused release automation, the promise and potential of decentralized architectures can really be achieved.

In this talk, we'll zoom in on the differences between releasing and deploying, approaches on how to extend a technical deployment pipeline with smart release automation, and different release strategies for several types of decentralized architectures.

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