Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous Delivery is the practice expanding your Continuous Integration (CI) usage to automatically re-deploy a proven build to a QA or UAT environment. If the bounce time for a deployment is quick enough, then it could be that you are doing that for every commit that lands in the shared trunk. The Radiator’s pipeline view would become:

The bestselling book of the same name by Jez Humble and Dave Farley, details the ‘marching orders’ for many companies, where there is whole dev-team improvement agenda.

A Layer above Trunk-Based Development

Continuous Delivery is a broad multifaceted subject, that sits on top of Trunk-Based Development as a practice. This website and this page, in particular, is not going to give it justice. Head on over to ContinuousDelivery.com and understand too that “lean experiments” are the part of CD and not so much the concern of Trunk-Based Development.

Continuous Deployment

An automatic push all the way into production; Maybe every commit

This is an extension of ‘Continuous Delivery’, but the deployment is to production. Certain types of startups like Netflix, Etsy and GitHub deploy their major application to production with each commit. Companies that have applications/services where clients/customers could lose money are much less likely to firehose into production.

References elsewhere

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