Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous delivery keeps software always releasable by automatically building, testing, and staging every change, with the production release left as a manual decision.
Continuous delivery (CD) extends continuous integration so that every validated change can be released to production at any time. The software is always in a deployable state, and the act of releasing is a business decision rather than a technical scramble.
How It Works
After continuous integration builds and tests a change, the continuous delivery pipeline promotes the resulting artifact through successive environments: staging, performance testing, and acceptance. Each environment runs automated checks that increase confidence the change is production-ready. The pipeline produces a deployable artifact and stops just short of pushing to production, where a human approves the release with one click or a single command.
Why It Matters
Continuous delivery shrinks the gap between writing code and delivering value. Because releases are small and frequent, each carries less risk and is easier to diagnose if something goes wrong. Teams gain the ability to ship on demand, respond quickly to market or security needs, and avoid the large, risky "big bang" releases that characterize slower processes. The key distinction from continuous deployment is the deliberate human gate before production.
Related Terms
Continuous delivery sits between continuous integration and continuous deployment. It relies on a robust pipeline and on safe deployment strategies such as blue-green and canary deployment.