Continuous deployment (CD) extends the practice of continuous integration (CI). With continuous deployment, when your integration is successful in one sandbox your changes are automatically promoted to the next sandbox. The CI strategy running in that environment automatically integrates your solution there because of the updated source files. As you can see in Figure 1 this automatic promotion continues until the point where any changes must be verified by a person, typically at the transition point between development and operations. Having said that, advanced teams are now automatically deploying into production as well because they’ve developed a sufficiently sophisticated automated validation strategy.
Continuous deployment enables development teams to reduce the time between a new feature being identified and being deployed into production. It enables the business to be more responsive. However, when development teams aren’t sufficiently disciplined continuous deployment can increase operational risk by increasing the potential for defects to be introduced into production. Successful continuous deployment in an enterprise environment requires an effective continuous integration strategy in place in all sandboxes.
February 2022