Continuous Delivery may have come out of companies that were "born on the web", but what if you are in a regulated, mature industry with sensitive customer data, where every change to production must be approved by a review board? How can you design, deploy, and execute automated tests that will work in environments that cannot be directly accessed by your team? How can you breach barriers to Continuous Delivery in a business context where the walls between development and operations are rigorously maintained? Vertafore is an intermediary in the insurance industry, providing information solutions for insurance agencies, carriers, managing general agents, and state agencies. When our team was tasked with enabling Continuous Delivery, we faced all of the above challenges. We overcame them using Jenkins, Artifactory, and Chef to build a Continuous Delivery system with automated test gates for promoting product and test code from Development through Staging to Production. Our Continuous Delivery system supports automatic promotion based on test results, or manual approval. Because of this flexibility, we were able to get adoption from product teams at each of the different stages of Continuous Delivery process maturity. It also provides a common way to deploy and test that our developers, testers, and release engineers can use in the same way in each environment. The system has enabled our company to increase the size and frequency of releases. This paper will cover the key patterns that our team developed or discovered in our journey, which can help you in creating your own Continuous Delivery system, regardless of the tool set.
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