Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are two key DevOps practices that help you release software faster and more reliably. Continuous delivery means your code is always ready to be released, but you choose when to launch it. Continuous deployment goes one step further—every change that passes automated tests is released to users automatically, without manual approval. Both approaches aim to make software updates safer and more frequent, but continuous deployment removes the final manual step.

How Continuous Delivery and Deployment Works

Continuous delivery (CD) and continuous deployment automate the process of moving code from development to production. This approach helps you deliver new features, bug fixes, and updates faster, while reducing manual errors and increasing reliability.

The CD Pipeline: Step by Step

Testing and Validation in the Pipeline

Automated testing and validation are critical to the CD process. By running tests at each stage, you catch issues early and ensure only high-quality code reaches users. This reduces downtime, increases user satisfaction, and builds trust in the release process.

Adopting continuous delivery and deployment helps you respond quickly to changes, improve collaboration, and maintain a reliable production environment.

Real-life scenario: frequent, safe web app updates with CD

A software team manages an online retail web application. To keep up with customer demands and industry trends, you need to release new features and bug fixes several times a week. Using a continuous delivery and deployment (CD) pipeline, you automate the build, testing, and deployment process.

Whenever a developer pushes code changes to the main branch:

• Automated tests run to check for bugs and regressions;
• The application is built and packaged automatically;
• Successful builds are deployed to a staging environment for further testing;
• After passing all checks, the update is deployed to production with zero downtime.

You use feature flags to control the rollout of new features, enabling you to turn them on for a small percentage of users first. If an issue appears, you can quickly disable the feature without rolling back the entire deployment.

This approach allows your team to release updates multiple times per week with confidence, knowing that every change is thoroughly tested and easy to control in production.

By automating the deployment pipeline, you can release new features and bug fixes faster and more reliably. Automated checks catch issues early, so you spend less time on manual testing and error-prone manual deployments.