For many software development teams, the first aspects that come to mind regarding continuous delivery (CD) are the operational challenges and competitive benefits. In the authors’ experience, CD was much more: it was a survival technique. This article presents how and why they applied CD in a large governmental project for the development of a collaborative development environment. They share the challenges they faced and the strategies they used to overcome them. The article concludes with a set of lessons learned that can be valuable for readers in a variety of situations. This article is part of a special issue on release engineering.