What Is the Difference Between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

Introduction

Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are two complementary practices that help teams get their software into the hands of users faster. They both aim to make things simpler for developers, but they differ in how they get there. Continuous integration (CI) builds your codebase by automatically integrating it with every other commit you make, then running tests on all those changes and deploying them to a staging environment.

If all goes well, this process results in a working artifact that's ready for release. The next step is continuous deployment (CD), which involves going from "ready-for-release" to deployed—all within a single step. So what does that mean? I'll explain below!

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is a process that involves building, testing, and releasing software in a controlled environment. This process allows developers to work more collaboratively and efficiently because it reduces the number of errors in production by ensuring code changes are integrated with the rest of your application as soon as possible.

Continuous Integration (CI) can be done manually or automated using tools like Jenkins or TeamCity. It's based on the idea that everyone commits new changes to their code base every day, so that if there are any errors they won't be left unaddressed forever—and they'll be caught early enough so you can fix them before anyone notices!

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery (CD) is the ability to release software changes safely and frequently. This means that you can release a new version of your product at any time, without having to go through extensive testing or validation processes.

The goal is to reduce the time it takes for teams to get feedback on their work (such as user acceptance testing) so they can make adjustments in real-time instead of waiting months or years until something is released publicly.

Continuous Delivery also focuses on improving quality over quantity—the focus is less on adding features than on making sure that each feature has been thoroughly tested before being deployed into production environments.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment is the ability to deploy to production at any time, using automated processes. Continuous deployment allows you to deploy multiple times a day, multiple times an hour, and even minutes. This process is also known as “Continuous Delivery."

Continuous Deployment can be achieved in two ways: either by using automated scripts that run on each commit or simply through manual steps like pushing code from your local machine over to production servers and waiting for them to push back before continuing with your next step.

Continuous Deployment is the end goal of Continuous Delivery

Continuous Deployment is a process where you can deploy your application at any time. This means that you are able to push code into production at any given time, instead of waiting for a specific time slot (like the end of the day or after a certain number of tests pass).

The idea behind Continuous Deployment is that you want to be able to quickly deploy your changes without having to worry about breaking anything. With a good automated test suite and proper monitoring in place, you can easily determine if your new code has caused any issues with the application. You can deploy your application at any time. You don’t have to wait for a certain release or version number, and you don’t even have to push new code yourself. This is possible because the deployment process is automated through scripts, so that whenever someone pushes code from their local machine over to production servers,

Conclusion

I hope this breakdown has helped you understand the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, and why they’re so important. If these terms still confuse you, don’t worry—I recommend reading more about them in an interesting blog post that I found recently!