Towards Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Delivery (CD), basically is an pratice of automating the entire software product release process. Ideally to do CI, and after that to prepare an track with the patch (latest one) towards production.

The desired outcome is anyone with sufficient accesses and privileges a new patch can be released at any time with few clicks to the production enviroment. This increases the overall productivity.

But, talking about Continuous Delivery, after testing the performance and behavior of the application with applied new patch in the Test or Developement environment includes atleast one manual step of approval and after that intiative is being taken to deploy the patch to the production enviroment.

So, to eliminate this manual overhead, Continuous Deplpoyment is  one step ahead of Continuous  Delivery, which inlcudes deployment of each and every change in the code directly and automactically to the production enviroment, without any explicit approval from the other developer.With each and every deployment in the production enviroment, particular tag is also released which includes Meta Data regardng the patch applied.

Continuous Deployment requires an thorough knowledge of developement culture and product functionality, as every patch is being applied with central or master repository and followed by the deployment of the same to the production enviroment without any external approval.