What Is Continuous Deployment?Continuous deployment (CD) is an indispensable aspect of a modern software development approach. It’s a strategy that automates the process of deploying software changes to a production environment. With CD, every change made to the codebase is automatically tested and pushed to production if it passes all tests. This means that there’s no human intervention in the process, and your updated application is always ready for use.
In a traditional software development environment, this process would be handled manually. Developers would write code, test it, and then pass it to the operations team for deployment. This could take days or even weeks, depending on the complexity of the changes. With continuous deployment, these changes are deployed in hours and sometimes even in minutes.
Continuous deployment is an extreme form of software pipeline automation. It has many advantages, because software development efforts can immediately deliver value to users. However, continuous deployment requires a high level of maturity in terms of software testing and deployment automation; to push updates directly to users without human intervention, you need very high confidence in your software delivery pipeline.
