DevOps and continuous practices are increasingly popular development practices aiming at bridging the gap between software development and IT operations with the indented outcome of shorter development life cycles while maintaining a high software quality. A fundamental part of many DevOps systems is a CI/CD (continuous integration/deployment) pipeline allowing for automatic building, testing and deployment of software. The use of continuous practices have been shown to achieve the desired outcomes, whereas the adopting of such practices has been attributed with the challenges of lacking expertise and skill as well as lacking available tools and technology. Execution of commands in a CI/CD pipeline are handled by a runner application, which can be configured in different ways allowing for different levels of the quality attributes performance, response time, throughput, robustness, stability, resource constraints, cost and maintainability. Five different types of runner infrastructure were implemented and evaluated on the quality attributes. These were: one single-machine implementation, one serverless implementation and three autoscaling implementations. For robustness and stability autoscaling implementations achieved the best results. Performance and throughput were affected by resource constraints which in turn affected the cost. Similar results were found for response time for all but one of the three autoscaling implementations, and for the serverless implementation. Finally, all implementations had similar results for reliability.

Denna uppsats studerar förutsättningarna för att implementera mjukvaruutvecklings - metoden Continuous Delivery (CDE). Problemställningen som lade grunden för studien, var att det inte finns någon enhetlig standard för CDE. Studien ämnade att undersöka om detta innebar att metoden har varierande innebörd inom olika företag och om de således, i viss mån tillämpar skilda tillvägagångssätt med metoden. Ytterligare en aspekt var att se vilka utmaningar företagen upplevde vid övergången till CDE. Att undersöka om det var främst organisatoriska eller utvecklingsrelaterade problem som upplevts. Samt hur de hanterade kommunikation och tillit till medarbetarna och arbetet inom verksamheten under förändringen. För att belysa problemen, beskrevs teori med fokus på organisatoriska och tekniska utmaningar med Continuous - metoderna: Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CDE) och Continuous Deployment (CD). Teorikapitlet samt tidigare studier inkluderade även forskning om kringliggande koncept som DevOps och LEAN. Metoder, vilka kan underlätta implementationen av CDE. Datainsamlingen genomfördes med öppna individuella intervjuer med representanter från sex stycken företag, där de delade med sig av deras erfarenheter av och syn på CDE. Studien visar att anledningen till att företag väljer att arbeta med CDE, är att de vill gå från utvecklingsmetoder, vilka kräver många beslut inför varje förändring, till ett mer flexibelt arbetssätt där de funnit fördelar som: bättre kvalitet på det som levereras, snabbare leverans av affärsvärde till kunder samt kortare feedback - loopar. Företag som gör en övergång till CDE väljer dessutom ofta att inte automatisera hela vägen ut till produktion, enligt CD, då de ser utmaningar med att säkra kvalitén. Studien har identifierat ett antal faktorer som viktiga för en framgångsrik implementering av CDE, samt faktorer som kan resultera i en svår övergång. / This thesis studies the conditions needed for implementing the software development method Continuous Delivery (CDE). The problem identified for the study, is that there is no standardized approach for CDE as of today. The intentions of the study were to determine whether this means that the method will have a shifting tenor within different companies, and if so, will these companies implement the method with different approaches. Another aspect was to determine which types of challenges the companies were faced with during the transition towards CDE. To review whether the challenges were foremost organisational or development related. And how the organisations handled the communication and trust towards the co-workers and the development work within the organisation during the change towards the method. To highlight these issues, we presented theories with focus on organisational and technical challenges with the different Continuous practices were made. The practices being: Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CDE) and Continuous Deployment (CD). The theory chapter and former studies also contains research about surrounding concepts such as DevOps and LEAN methods, which can aim to facilitate the implementation of CDE. The empirical data collection was performed using open individual interviews with informants from six different companies, where they shared their experience and views on the method CDE. The study demonstrates that the reason organisations chose to implement CDE, is that they want to transform from software development methods, which requires a lot of decision making for any change, to a more flexible work procedure, in order to experience benefits such as: better quality of what is delivered, faster deliveries of business value to the customers and faster feedback-loops. Organisations that make the transition towards CDE also tend not to automate all the way to production, as in agreement with CD, this because the organisations identify challenges with assuring that the quality is sufficient. The study has identified a number of factors that are essential for a successful implementation of CDE, along with factors that may result in a less successful implementation.