Continuous Deployment
Definition
Continuous Deployment is the practice of automatically releasing every change that passes all stages of the production pipeline to production.
This approach automates the entire software release process. After code is committed, it undergoes a series of automated tests and checks. If a change successfully navigates through all these predefined stages, it is automatically deployed to the live production environment without any manual intervention. This allows for very frequent and rapid updates to software applications.
For example, a bug fix that passes all automated tests would be live for users within minutes of being committed by a developer.
This methodology is commonly employed in software development, particularly within agile and DevOps environments.