How we scaled Continuous Delivery across 1000s of Developers and 100s of applications

Many organisations attempt to standardise their path to production. Most fall short. What starts as a push for consistency often results in brittle pipelines, increasing exceptions, and developers working around the platform rather than with it.

This talk shares a practical and proven approach that has enabled Continuous Delivery adoption at scale across thousands of developers and hundreds of services in environments with a wide range of technologies and constraints.

We will explore how treating the Path to Production as a Contract between developers, operations, security, and change creates alignment and accountability. We will also walk through five common anti-patterns that quietly undermine adoption, and how to avoid them before they become systemic.

On the technical side, we will cover:

• Why DIVAs (Deployable, Immutable, Versioned Artifacts) are foundational for Continuous Delivery
• How the right delivery unit design reduces blast radius and improves autonomy
• The difference between CI validation and promotion, and how separating them improves flow
• How to match the testing strategy to delivery goals without adding delay
• What application architecture needs to provide to support reliable and scalable delivery

If you are building a platform for software delivery, this talk will offer patterns, pitfalls, and principles that work in practice.