What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

Continuous Delivery means code is always ready to deploy but requires manual approval to go to production. Continuous Deployment automatically pushes every change that passes tests to production without human intervention. Most businesses start with Continuous Delivery and progress to Continuous Deployment as their testing confidence grows.

What CI/CD tool should I use?

If you use GitHub, start with GitHub Actions (free for public repos, included minutes for private). GitLab CI is excellent if you use GitLab. For more complex needs, Jenkins offers maximum flexibility. For web applications, Vercel and Netlify provide built-in CI/CD. Choose based on your code hosting platform and complexity requirements.

How do I start with CI/CD?

Start simple: set up automated tests that run on every pull request (Continuous Integration). Then add automated deployment to a staging environment. Once confident, add automated production deployment with manual approval. You do not need a complex pipeline from day one -- build incrementally as your testing coverage and confidence grow.

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CI/CD

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery

Also known as:continuous integration/continuous deliveryautomated deployment pipeline

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment -- automated practices that enable frequent, reliable code changes through automated building, testing, and deployment pipelines.

In-Depth Explanation

CI/CD combines Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Continuous Deployment) to automate the software development lifecycle. It enables teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably through automation.

Continuous Integration (CI):

Developers merge code changes to a shared repository frequently (multiple times daily)
Each merge triggers automated builds and tests
Problems are detected and fixed quickly
Reduces integration conflicts and "merge hell"

Continuous Delivery (CD):

Code that passes CI is automatically prepared for release
Deployment to production requires manual approval
Ensures code is always in a deployable state
Reduces deployment risk through small, frequent releases

Continuous Deployment:

Code that passes all automated tests is automatically deployed to production
No manual approval needed
Requires high confidence in automated testing
Enables multiple deployments per day

CI/CD pipeline stages:

Source: Code committed to version control (Git)
Build: Application compiled/built
Test: Automated tests run (unit, integration, end-to-end)
Stage: Deploy to staging environment for verification
Deploy: Release to production
Monitor: Track application health post-deployment

CI/CD tools:

GitHub Actions: Integrated with GitHub repositories
GitLab CI/CD: Built into GitLab platform
Jenkins: Open-source, highly customisable
CircleCI: Cloud-native CI/CD
AWS CodePipeline: AWS-native CI/CD
Vercel/Netlify: Automated deployment for web applications

Business Context

CI/CD reduces deployment risk by 50-80% and enables teams to ship improvements faster, with high-performing teams deploying 200x more frequently than low performers while having 24x faster recovery from failures.

How Clever Ops Uses This

Clever Ops sets up CI/CD pipelines for Australian businesses, enabling their development teams to ship changes confidently and frequently. We configure automated testing, staging environments, and deployment workflows that reduce the risk of deploying broken code while accelerating the delivery of new features and improvements.

Example Use Case

"A SaaS company implements GitHub Actions CI/CD, reducing their deployment process from a risky 4-hour manual procedure done monthly to an automated 15-minute pipeline run multiple times per week."