5-Minute DevOps: CD Won’t Work Here

When people try to help an organization move toward continuous delivery or engineers advocate for the better outcomes that come with it, we hear the same excuses. The words change, but the message is consistent.

Some of the greatest hits we hear:

“There’s more than one way to deliver software.”
“We’re not Amazon.”
“Our team doesn’t have enough experience.” “That won’t work here.”
“Our best developers will quit.”
“That seems risky.”
“We don’t have time to make changes.”

Each one sounds reasonable until you unpack what it really means: “We’re not ready to improve.”

“There’s more than one way to deliver software.”

True — like there’s more than one way to land a plane. Some end better than others.
If your delivery method can’t safely get features from idea to user quickly and repeatedly, maybe it’s time to stop defending it.

“We’re not Amazon.”

No one said you were. But you do have users who expect stable systems, faster feedback, and fewer incidents.
Continuous delivery isn’t about being Amazon; it’s about being able to respond to the needs of the business and to the unexpected safely, quickly, and without drama.

“Our team doesn’t have enough experience.”

Then leadership’s job is to fix that. The longer you delay, the less experience you’ll have when you finally need those skills.

“That won’t work here.”

Translation: “We don’t want to do the work required to make it work here.”
The laws of feedback and flow apply everywhere. The details change, but the physics don’t.

“Our best developers will quit.”

If your “best developers” refuse to improve how they deliver, they aren’t your best developers.
They’re your best at preserving the status quo.

“That seems risky.”

You’re right. Change is risky. So is running a system where every deploy is an act of faith.
Continuous delivery reduces real risk by exposing problems faster and limiting the blast radius of mistakes.

“We don’t have time to make changes.”

Then you’ve locked yourself into a death spiral. Continuous delivery is how you get time back —
by turning large, unpredictable failures into small, recoverable ones.

“Too much overhead.”

If improving safety, speed, and stability is “overhead,” your definition of efficiency is upside down.

Continuous delivery eliminates the overhead of firefighting, manual approval chains, and waiting for integration failures in production.

“Customers can’t keep up.”

That’s what feature flags, canary releases, and progressive rollouts are for.

The goal of CD isn’t to flood customers with features — it’s to *enable* controlled, reversible change when the business needs it.

Delivery frequency is about feedback, not feature fatigue.

Leadership often confuses disruption of comfort with introduction of risk.
Continuous delivery doesn’t add risk; it exposes the risk that was already there.

The right question isn’t “Will CD work here?”
It’s “Do we want to know the truth about how we deliver?”

Because CD will show you — whether you like the answer or not.

Starting your journey? This may help: https://practices.minimumcd.org/