Warren Parad
2 min readJan 8, 2020

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I think a couple of the terms probably need a better explanation. These should have been simple concepts, but it seems you made them more complicated for some reason.

  • Continuous Delivery — This has very little to do with the software at all but instead is a focus on the product release process. This is inline with Agile. That is to say, rather than releasing one big change to users, you instead focus on breaking up that work into smaller chunks so that a small part can be always available to be delivered at any time. It really has nothing to do with the systems that support that.
  • Continuous Deployment — This is just not a thing. You can never continuously deploy unless you edit code directly in production. The truth is that no matter what you are working on it should be going into your deployment pipeline. This is the concept of continuous integration.

The reason we call it CI/CD, is because this joins the aspects of technology with the aspects of product to release to users. The CI is the automated nature of building and deploying your technology. Whether you have manual steps or not is not the important factor, but whether the pipeline is automated and visible to the development team. CI also includes any and all testing, What you have denoted Continuous Deployment is really just further automation on CI, it isn’t a different thing. For instance, if the set up of the development repository is a single click or multiple isn’t included in any of your diagrams, but is also potentially part of CI. Additionally, blue/green deployment and staged rollouts aren’t included but can only be done as part of deployment to production, this is also part of CI.

Simplification of these terms is really:

  • CI => Automation in everything development released all the way to releasing the solution
  • CD => Breaking a product into features to deliver one at a time, each with quantifiable value.

No reason to make it more complicated than that.

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Warren Parad
Warren Parad

Written by Warren Parad

CTO and Founder Authress, Complete Auth for B2B.

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