I often hear the terms Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment used interchangeably in our sprint planning meetings, but I know there is a technical distinction between them. From a project management perspective, how does the "manual approval" step change the risk profile of a release? We are looking to automate our pipeline further, but the stakeholders are nervous about removing the final human check before code goes live to our actual customers. Can someone explain the practical implications of both?
3 answers
The core difference lies in the final step of the pipeline. Continuous Delivery ensures that every code change is built, tested, and pushed to a repository, but it requires a manual "click" to deploy to production. This is ideal for regulated industries. Continuous Deployment goes a step further by automatically releasing every change that passes the test suite directly to users. While "Deployment" offers the fastest feedback loop, it requires extremely robust automated testing and monitoring. For nervous stakeholders, I suggest starting with Delivery to build trust in your automated gates before moving to full Deployment.
Does your current infrastructure support "Blue-Green" deployments or "Canary" releases to help mitigate the risks that your stakeholders are currently worried about?
Continuous Delivery is about being "ready" to ship at any moment, whereas Deployment is the act of actually shipping automatically. Most enterprises prefer the control of Delivery for major features.
Spot on, Christopher. Having that manual gate in Continuous Delivery serves as a final sanity check for the business side, ensuring that marketing and support teams are actually ready for the new update.
Linda, we are currently looking into Blue-Green deployments on AWS. This would allow us to route only a small percentage of traffic to the new version. If the monitoring tools detect any spike in 500-errors or latency, the load balancer automatically reverts to the "Green" environment. This safety net is often the only way to convince a cautious management team to move toward a more automated Continuous Deployment model.