📍 Introduction

Continuous Delivery (CD) is the practice of ensuring that software is always in a releasable state, with an emphasis on automating the entire software delivery process from development to production. In CD, the software is continuously built, tested, and prepared for release, but the actual release decision is still made by a human.

Continuous Deployment (CDP), on the other hand, is the next step in the software delivery process after CD. It is the practice of automatically deploying every release that passes the automated testing process to production. In CDP, the release decision is made automatically based on the outcome of the automated tests.

so, the main difference between Continuous Delivery and Deployment is that in CD, the release decision is still made by a human, while in CDP, it is automated.

🔸 Example Explanation:

Let's understand the difference using a school project of a student: Imagine you're working on a school project with a team of classmates, and you're all responsible for different parts of the project. You need to make sure that everyone's work fits together seamlessly, and that the final product is ready for submission on time.

Continuous Delivery (CD) is like making sure that your part of the project is always ready to be submitted. Let's say you're responsible for the research part of the project. You might use a program like Google Docs to write up your research and share it with your team. With CD, you would make sure that your work is always up-to-date and accurate, and that you're constantly checking it for errors. You might also set up a system to automatically check for spelling and grammar mistakes, to make sure your work is always in a "releasable" state. This way, when it's time to put all the pieces of the project together, your work will be ready to go.

Continuous Deployment (CDP) is like taking the next step and automatically submitting the project as soon as it's ready. Let's say your team has finished putting all the pieces of the project together and you're happy with how it looks. With CDP, you might set up a system to automatically submit the project to your teacher as soon as it passes a series of tests. These tests might include things like checking for formatting errors, making sure all the links work, and verifying that the content is appropriate for the assignment. If the project passes all the tests, it would be automatically submitted to the teacher without anyone needing to manually do it.

📍 Conclusion

In Conclusion, Continuous Delivery is about making sure that your work is always ready to be submitted, while Continuous Deployment takes it a step further by automatically submitting it as soon as it's ready. In the real world, these concepts are used by software development teams to make sure that their code is always in a releasable state and that new features and bug fixes are automatically deployed to users as soon as they're ready. This helps teams work more efficiently and deliver a better product to their users.

🔹 Image Credits:

• https://medium.com/edureka/continuous-delivery-vs-continuous-deployment-5375642865a

• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Continuous-delivery-and-deployment_fig2_339135798