Towards Architecting for Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious software development discipline, with the promise of providing organizations the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Our organization has been implementing CD for the last two years. Thus far, we have moved 22 software applications to CD. I observed that CD has created a new context for architecting these applications. In this paper, I will try to characterize such a context of CD, explain why we need to architect for CD, describe the implications of architecting for CD, and discuss the challenges this new context creates. This information can provide insights to other practitioners for architecting their software applications, and provide researchers with input for developing their research agendas to further study this increasingly important topic.