Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment automatically ships every change that passes the pipeline to production, with no manual gate, relying on strong tests and progressive rollout.
Continuous deployment is the practice of automatically releasing to production every change that passes the full automated pipeline. It removes the manual approval gate present in continuous delivery, so a developer's merge can reach users within minutes.
How It Works
A change flows through continuous integration, then through the same automated staging and acceptance checks used in continuous delivery. If every gate is green, the deployment to production happens automatically. Because there is no human reviewing each release, the safety net must be entirely automated: comprehensive tests, progressive rollout strategies like canary deployment, feature flags to decouple deploy from release, and automated rollback triggered by health metrics.
Why It Matters
Continuous deployment maximizes flow and minimizes batch size; many organizations deploy dozens or hundreds of times per day. Small, frequent changes are easier to reason about and to revert. The trade-off is a high bar for test coverage and observability, since a defect can reach users without human review. For this reason continuous deployment is usually adopted only after a team has mature continuous delivery practices and strong monitoring.
Related Terms
Continuous deployment builds directly on continuous delivery and continuous integration, and depends on feature flags and canary deployment to release changes safely.