Google deployments used to be managed by a large number of heterogeneous & complex workflows. Currently, most of production is maintained through continuous intent-based deployment, as the result of the work since 2015 on Prodspec & Annealing – Google’s continuous deployment infrastructure. In this talk, we will briefly describe what we call “continuous intent-based deployment” and then go over the main principles that made Prodspec & Annealing work at scale: why intent generation should be a first class citizen? How to approach intent actuation with Select-Update-Validate? And how those principles, along with a couple others, made it possible to encode best practices across many services.