In this consumer driven era businesses are turning to DevOps to help them keep up with the demand for new software, features and functions, and to enable them to respond quickly to shifts in their markets. Most companies interpret this as needing to move to being “Continuous” but are unsure as to whether they should be implementing Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment.

What’s the difference?

Continuous Delivery (CD): Having the ability to deploy a change to production at any time. However, this does not mean that you deploy each change to prod.

Continuous Deployment (CDep): Deploying every tested change to production automatically.

Continuous Deployment is an evolution of Continuous Delivery where the decision process is typically automated and binary. For example test(s) passed = deploy / test(s) failed = don’t deploy.