Principle 4 - Speed
Continuous Synchronization
In principle, continuous synchronization (CS) is the automation practice of automating forward and synchronizing backward all deployed changes across all sub-prod and prod instances. Automating deployments forward from development instances is intuitive and obvious. However, the practice of CS demands that changes to higher-level instances synchronize backward to all lower-level instances. For example, suppose an update set is completed in a Dev instance and migrated to your QA instance. In that case, that change MUST now be automatically migrated backwards from QA to all of your other Dev instances. This back-syncing must be continuous, which means it must be automated.
Here’s another example. It is common to make hotfix changes in your PROD instance(s) or other high-level sub-prod instances. These changes must also be synchronized backward to all other instances below them. Continuous Synchronization seeks to keep all instances as close to production-like as possible. Automatically synchronizing all your instances in this manner does two things.