Continuous Deployment
Automatically releasing every change that passes validation.
Continuous deployment releases every change that passes automated validation, without a human release step. Continuous delivery is the weaker sibling: every change is made releasable, and a person chooses when to press the button.
The practice depends entirely on the confidence of the validation, which is why it tends to arrive together with strong testing, Feature Flags, and quick rollback. Flags matter most: they decouple deploying code from enabling behavior, so shipping unfinished work becomes safe and releasing becomes a configuration change rather than a deployment.
Deployment is also where a whole category of environment-specific failure lives, and it is the category least covered by ordinary checks. A database migration that runs in a fresh environment and fails in the deployed one; a required secret that exists locally and not in production; a platform-provided variable under a name the application does not read; a certificate that has to be provisioned separately. None of this is visible to a type checker or a test suite.
The only honest verification is to reproduce the deployment path end to end — reset, migrate, build, start in production mode, and request the real thing. See Database Migration and Ground Truth.
See also8
Secret Management
Storing, distributing, and rotating credentials without embedding them in code or history.
Systems & Tooling33 connections
Vacuous Truth
A statement that holds only because its subject set is empty — a green result that measured nothing.
Method26 connections
Trunk-Based Development
Everyone integrating into one shared branch continuously, with short-lived feature branches.
Version Control & Delivery20 connections
Continuous Integration
Automatically building and testing every change, so integration problems surface immediately.
Version Control & Delivery38 connections
Containerization
Packaging an application with its dependencies into an isolated, reproducible runtime unit.
Systems & Tooling33 connections
Silent Failure
A failure that produces no signal, so the absence of an error reads as success.
Method73 connections
Definition of Done
A team's shared checklist of what must be true before work counts as finished, such as reviewed, tested, documented, and deployed, which keeps hidden work from piling up behind items marked complete.
Version Control & Delivery9 connections
Progressive Delivery
Releasing a change to a growing share of users while watching its effect, so problems are caught when they affect few people and the rollout halts automatically.
Version Control & Delivery7 connections
Linked from14
- Canary ReleaseVersion Control & Delivery
Shipping a change to a small slice of traffic first, and only widening it once that slice looks healthy.
- ContainerizationSystems & Tooling
Packaging an application with its dependencies into an isolated, reproducible runtime unit.
- Continuous IntegrationVersion Control & Delivery
Automatically building and testing every change, so integration problems surface immediately.
- Database MigrationData & Content
A versioned, ordered change to a database schema, applied once and recorded.
- Definition of DoneVersion Control & Delivery
A team's shared checklist of what must be true before work counts as finished, such as reviewed, tested, documented, and deployed, which keeps hidden work from piling up behind items marked complete.
- Feature FlagData & Content
A runtime switch that decouples shipping code from enabling behavior.
- GitOpsVersion Control & Delivery
Using a Git repository as the live source of truth for deployed state, reconciled continuously by an in-cluster agent.
- Infrastructure as CodeVersion Control & Delivery
Defining infrastructure in version-controlled files instead of configuring it by hand through a console.
- Live Service GamePlay & Games
A game operated as a running service rather than shipped as a finished artifact, with the consequences that shift implies.
- Progressive DeliveryVersion Control & Delivery
Releasing a change to a growing share of users while watching its effect, so problems are caught when they affect few people and the rollout halts automatically.
- Release TrainVersion Control & Delivery
Shipping on a fixed schedule whether or not a given feature is ready, so features that miss one release simply wait for the next instead of holding everyone back.
- Rolling ReleaseSystems & Tooling
A distribution model that ships updates continuously instead of in versioned batches, trading stability for currency.
- Secret ManagementSystems & Tooling
Storing, distributing, and rotating credentials without embedding them in code or history.
- Zero-Downtime DeploymentVersion Control & Delivery
Deploying a new version while the service keeps serving every request, with no maintenance window.