At QCon London, David Farley (@davefarley77) told the audience that “continuous delivery changes the economics of software delivery”. I could not agree more.

If you have been drawn to the evangelists like David Farley, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, you’ll know that high performance IT organizations are seeing a massive payoff in their continuous delivery investments. Industry leaders big and small are sharing noticeable results:

8x more frequent production deployments

50% lower change failure rates

12x faster service restoration times when something went wrong



5 Principles

How are they achieving these results? They are following a few key principles that David and Jez outlined in their seminal book, Continuous Delivery (highly recommended). The principles outlined in their book and in David’s QCon presentation are as follows:

Deliver fast

Automate almost everything

Keep everything in version control

Build quality In

Empower the team

Reference Architectures for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

In their book, they also provide insight to continuous delivery tool chains and processes which highlight build tools, CI platforms, testing suites, artifact repositories, and many other components. There are numerous examples of reference architectures available, and each of them vary in levels of detail, tools highlighted, and processes followed. Yet, there is a constant theme among the tool sets: Jenkins, Maven, Nexus, Subversion, Git, Docker, Puppet/Chef, Rundeck, and Sonar seem to show up time and again.

To help you along your continuous delivery and DevOps journey, I have compiled a set of 31 reference architectures created by users across the continuous delivery and DevOps communities.





Each architecture is accompanied by a link to the original presentation or blog where the architecture was referenced to ensure you have access to the full context of the discussion. You can also freely download the presentation from SlideShare where we now have over 7,000 views.

Offer to help others: If you have a reference architecture to share, please consider posting a link to it in the comments section below. I am sure others would love to see it and learn from it.