Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment What’s the Difference?
Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are both common terms in DevOps. They’re both used to deliver software and IT faster and more reliably. They’re both related — in fact, you could even say they’re iterative — but they’re distinct parts of a DevOps approach.
Read on to learn the differences between continuous delivery and continuous deployment, what makes them essential to DevOps at scale, how they’re used to increase efficiency, how they reduce errors and busy work, and why automation is essential to both.
Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment — What’s the Difference?
The main difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is simple: Continuous delivery automates deployment of a release to a staging or testing environment, while continuous deployment automatically deploys every release to production (after it passes through your pipeline, including testing).
While they are different, continuous deployment is an extension of the continuous delivery concept. That is to say, releases that are moved forward using continuous delivery can eventually be deployed using continuous deployment. You can look at continuous deployment as a more fully automated release process that needs no manual input, which makes the strength of your testing process much more important when you adopt continuous deployment.
It’s easier to understand the differences between continuous delivery and deployment when you consider what place each actually has in your DevOps approach:
What Continuous Delivery Does and Doesn’t Do
- Continuous delivery automatically deploys releases to a testing or staging environment.
- Continuous delivery does not automatically deploy code changes to production.
- Continuous delivery does require human intervention to deploy a release from staging to production.
What Continuous Deployment Does and Doesn’t Do
- Continuous deployment automatically deploys releases from building through testing and into production.
- Continuous deployment doesn’t require human intervention.
- Continuous deployment doesn’t ensure your testing culture and protocol is up to snuff. It simply looks for a checked box and, if it finds the box is checked, deploys the release to production and beyond.
The Benefits of Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment
Both continuous delivery and deployment have a place in DevOps. It’s not so much a matter of which is “better” or “worse” and more about which is right for your infrastructure. Both have significant benefits for software development and operations.
Smoother Releases
Automating testing and deployment with continuous delivery and deployment means releases can happen with the push of a button, rather than taking days to plan for and execute. And with continuous delivery, since every change is delivered to a staging environment using complete IT automation, you can have confidence the application can be deployed to production with a push of a button when it’s ready.
More Frequent Releases
Continuous delivery and deployment compress the time between releases, letting you speed up a feedback loop with customers to improve quality faster with every iteration. And when iterations can happen daily, rather than monthly or even less frequently, customers can stay up-to-date with the latest and highest-quality version of the software.
Safer Releases
Continuous delivery sticks a manual approval stage before deployment to production. But even continuous deployment, which automates the whole release all the way through testing, can ensure more reliable releases, provided you’ve got strong testing tools, strategy, and culture. Since automated processes like continuous delivery and deployment work in smaller change batches, issues in each release are easier to remediate than the code changes pushed out with infrequent, mammoth-sized manual releases.
Less Manual Work
With continuous delivery and deployment, development sees changes live in minutes. Less time spent deploying and testing = more time spent increasing release quality.
Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment: What Level of Automation is Right for Your Organization?
Automation reduces the amount of human intervention in any process. And the release process, common to all DevOps, is one area in which automation is a no-brainer. And the extent of that automation is up to each organization or business and dependent on what their infrastructure really needs.
For example, maybe you need to reduce time spent on releases, but your QA isn’t quite ready to automate testing. Or maybe your DevOps processes have quality on lock and you just want to find new efficiencies in the release process. Whatever your automation readiness, Puppet is there with the right infrastructure and IT automation solution at any scale.
