Software development is a strange craft. In some ways things seem to stay the same forever; we still sit at the same Unix command line from over 20 years ago and we use usually the same editors, but the software being developed feels pretty different. The constant theme over the last decade or more has been creating and delivering smaller and smaller chunks of new code, faster and faster. I used to develop code that wouldn’t be used by actual customers until more than a quarter after I originally wrote it. Today, it’s not unusual to get live feedback from customers for changes made just yesterday. By necessity, the steps required to safely move code from developer's laptop to a production server have become small, fast, and highly consistent via automation.

Recently, our team at Cerner automated deployments to deliver code to thousands of servers in production every week. In this session, I will walk through the decisions that I have had to make when building that pipeline and how we have used a very old Jenkins tool to solve the modern delivery puzzle.