Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) means every change that passes Continuous Integration produces a releasable artifact; production deploy is a deliberate, low-risk promotion (button, approval, or automated stage), not an emergency rebuild. We adopt CD for all products; choose Continuous Deployment (assess) only when Software as a Service economics and observability justify shipping every green mainline commit.
Blurb
Continuous delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.
Summary
CI vs CD:
| Stage | Technique | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Merge to main | Continuous Integration (adopt) | Built, tested artifact |
| Releasable always | Continuous Delivery (adopt) | Artifact in registry/repo; deploy pending |
| Auto to production | Continuous Deployment (assess) | No human promote step |
Typical delivery pipeline (after CI):
- Broader testing (system/integration in staging)
- Artifact signing and provenance (supply chain)
- Artifact publishing (registry, chart repo, installer blob)
- Promotion to environments (dev → staging → prod) with gates
When delivery (not deployment): on-prem or customer-operated installs, regulated industries, multi-tenant SaaS with scheduled releases, or when rollback/feature control needs a human promote.
When deployment instead: internal Software as a Service with Feature Flags, strong metrics, and automated rollback; see Continuous Deployment.
Tooling: GitHub Actions for build/sign/publish; ArgoCD + GitOps for K8s promote-by-sync; avoid Capistrano-style SSH push for new work.
Details
| Topic | Notes |
|---|---|
| Definition of done | Main is green and artifact is in the catalog customers could receive |
| Gates | Manual approval, change windows, or policy checks on promote |
| Config | Environment-specific values outside the image (12-factor) |
| Rollback | Redeploy previous artifact tag; keep N-1 ready |
Garden pattern: adopt CD everywhere; assess auto-deploy per product. Pair with Pull Request required checks and CI-CD Tools in the garden.
References