Continuous Delivery Architecture case studies
Continuous Delivery Architecture · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Continuous Delivery Architecture credential is aimed at engineers who design and operate the systems that move code from commit to production: pipeline architects, senior DevOps engineers, build-and-release leads, and platform engineers. It tests architecture judgment rather than tool trivia. The Continuous Delivery Architecture case studies are 5 cases and about 4,997 words.
1Eleven Days of Lead Time, Four Hours of Work
Lumen Outfitters is an e-commerce company with 9 product teams and 130 engineers running a Java storefront monolith plus 14 supporting services. Last quarter, deployment frequency was 2.4 per week and median lead time for changes (first commit to production) was 11.8 days.
771 words, about 4 min2One Pipeline, Three Rebuilds, Six Hours to Production
Kestrel Payments runs a single pipeline for a 60-service platform. On every merge to main it compiles all services (28 minutes), runs unit tests (14 minutes), builds a Docker image tagged with the pipeline ID, and then, for each of dev, staging and production, re-runs the build and re-tags the image.
1,059 words, about 5 min36,100 Browser Tests and a Skip Label
Halcyon Health's patient portal has 6,100 end-to-end Selenium tests running against a shared staging environment. The suite takes 4 hours 20 minutes wall-clock on 8 parallel browser nodes; median flake rate is 11% per test and roughly 60% of pipeline runs fail at least once.
1,028 words, about 5 min4A Canary That Could Not Roll Back a Dropped Column
Arcadia Subscriptions deploys a Java monolith five times a day behind a canary: 3% of traffic for 10 minutes, then 100%, with automatic rollback if the 5xx rate exceeds 1%. The service uses a single PostgreSQL 15 database shared with the previous version during rollout.
1,025 words, about 5 min5Ninety Services, Sixty-Two Values Files, One Stripe Key
Tidewater Logistics has 380 repositories deploying 90 services to Kubernetes across 4 environments. Configuration is supplied as environment variables in Helm values files committed to each repository; 62 of those files contain database passwords and third-party API keys.
1,114 words, about 6 min