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Truly agile development is no longer wishful thinking in the age of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based applications and solutions. Innovators like Google (News - Alert) and Amazon are continuously rolling out new features and solutions on a broad scale, and most of the time everything goes smoothly and works at the end of the day.

Being able to practice agile development while retaining stability is a challenge for even the most innovative companies. But true agility goes hand in hand with solid performance, according to a recent LinkedIn post from David Ginsburg (News - Alert), CMO at Teridion. Teridion specializes in cloud optimized routing for next-generation content delivery networks.

According to Ginsburg, SaaS (News - Alert) developers need to temper agility with the principles of proven, long development cycles. They may do this by figuring out an appropriate release cycle and balancing that with feature needs as well as the platform architecture. Teridion did just that when developing for its Teridion Cloud OS offering, using an eight-week release cycle with three two-week sprints along with a two-week integration period. The company has successfully stuck to this cycle for fixes and maintenance releases since last winter thanks to careful planning and consideration.

Ginsburg wrote that Teridion’s success stems from providing buffer for the engineering and QA teams, and the company is also using project tracking and collaboration solutions to streamline the process. The Teridion Management System (TMS) supports the customer portal and customer virtual backbones are handled through Teridion Cloud Virtual Routers (TCRs). Services are delivered through a variety of cloud infrastructure providers, including AWS, IBM (News - Alert) Cloud, Google Cloud and Digital Ocean.

When a new release is handed over, TMS is upgraded during a pre-arranged maintenance window. Meanwhile, the TCRs still run the previous Cloud OS version. If anything goes wrong during the upgrade, the company has fallback plans in place. Once the new TMS has been working for at least 24 hours, Teridion upgrades the TCRs and can also rollback those updates if needed. The company plans to use this system to roll out new capabilities to specific regions as well as specific customers’ virtual backbones.

The system will work well for any SaaS vendor interested in agile development but worried about maintaining stability. As systems like Teridion’s become the norm for rolling out upgrades and improved features, a growing number of vendors may be expected to confidently practice true agile development.