Deploying all day - Sean O'Connor

I recently watched a technical presentation from Sean O'Connor of bitly where he discussed how they achieved up to 20 deployments a day. Whilst much of their techniques are publicized and well known - one of the interesting points he raised was how they only have a single source repository. I don't think this is new; I've heard rumours that Google do the same, and have done for years.

My eyes always light up when I hear these types of stories. They're bold and clever, but I only wish I could do the same......Unfortunately, for me my business is insurance, and not technology - so getting a project manager to accept additional costs that don't immediately result in cash is difficult.

So, why do I think this is a good move?

Its much easier to track and baseline your systems when all of the source is in a single location. Modern version control systems offer a lot of flexibility in this area, and provided you have a bunch of well disciplined developers - you wont have to worry about things like commit messages.

I do still see problems.

My biggest concern would be that unless you start doing some clever tracking on sections of your source tree instead of the tree as a whole, you could be constantly hammering your CI resulting in queues. This could potentially cause long feedback cycles which is an anti-pattern of continuous delivery.