Continuous deployment (CD) is a
software engineering approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently and through automated
deployments.
Continuous deployment contrasts with ''
continuous delivery
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. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed ...
'' (also abbreviated CD), a similar approach in which software functionalities are also frequently delivered and deemed to be potentially capable of being deployed, but are actually not deployed. As such, continuous deployment can be viewed as a more complete form of automation than continuous delivery.
Motivation
A major motivation for continuous deployment is that deploying software into the field more often makes it easier to find, catch, and fix bugs. A bug is easier to fix when it comes from code deployed five minutes ago instead of five days ago.
Example
In an environment in which data-centric
microservices
In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern is characterize ...
provide the functionality, and where the microservices can have multiple instances, continuous deployment consists of instantiating the new version of a microservice and retiring the old version once it has drained all the requests in flight.
See also
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CI/CD
In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) or, less often, continuous deployment. They are sometimes referred to collectively as continuous development or contin ...
, the combined practices of either (more often)
continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of integrating source code changes frequently and ensuring that the integrated codebase is in a workable state.
Typically, developers Merge (version control), merge changes to an Branching (revisio ...
and
continuous delivery
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. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed ...
, or (less often) continuous integration and continuous deployment
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Canary release
A feature toggle in software development provides an alternative to maintaining multiple feature branches in source code. A condition within the code enables or disables a feature during runtime. In agile settings the toggle is used in product ...
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Blue–green deployment
In software engineering, blue–green deployment is a method of installing changes to a web, app, or database server by swapping alternating production and staging servers.
Overview
In blue–green deployments, two servers are maintained: a "bl ...
References
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Software development process
Software release