Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, without doing so manually. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
CD contrasts with continuous deployment, a similar approach in which software is also produced in short cycles but through automated deployments rather than manual ones.
—Wikipedia, “Continuous delivery”
Continuous Delivery is a set of principles, patterns, and practices designed to make deployments—whether of a large-scale distributed system, a complex production environment, an embedded system, or a mobile app—predictable, routine affairs that can be performed on demand at any time.
The object of Continuous Delivery is to be able to get changes of all types—including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
—ACMQueue, “Continuous Delivery Sounds Great, but Will It Work Here?”
All these features [of Internet-facing systems] are simultaneously products of the environment and enablers of it. They have emerged in large part because the technical artifacts are evolving quickly, but moreso because the artifacts cannot be observed or manipulated directly. Computing is detectable only via representations synthesized to show its passing. Similarly, it can be manipulated only via representations.
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