Assuming that change is constant

The world of IoT analytics moves quickly. The analytics you create today will change many times over as you get feedback on results and adapt to the changing business conditions. Your analytics processes will need to change. Assume this will happen continuously and design for change. This brings us to the concept of continuous delivery.

Continuous delivery is a concept from software development. It automates the release of code into production. The idea is to make change a regular process. Bring this concept into your analytics by keeping a set of simultaneous copies that you use to progress through three stages:

1. Development: Keep a copy of your analytics for improving and trying out new things.
2. Test: When ready, merge your improvements into this copy where the functionality stays the same, but it is repeatedly tested. The testing ensures it is working as intended. Keeping a separate copy for test allows development to continue on other functionality.
3. Master: This is the copy that goes into production. When you merge things from test to the master copy, it is the same as putting it into live use. Cloud providers often have a continuous delivery service that can make this process simpler.

For any software developer readers out there, this is a simplification of the git flow method, which is a little outside the scope of this book. If the author can drop a suggestion, it is worth some additional research to learn git flow and apply it to your analytics development in the cloud.