What is Continuous Delivery and why do Software Teams Need it?

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In the digital era, it’s all about speed. It’s how businesses both excel and compete. And if you’re in the software business, speed is defined as getting changes - bug fixes, new features, or updates for back-end operations - in the hands of the customers faster. This can be measured through higher deployment, faster lead time to change, and reduced developer toil – and one way to improve all three is continuous delivery.

What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous delivery (CD) is a key aspect of the software development process, enabling developers to release small and frequent software updates, safely and reliably. CD aims to automate and streamline the software development process. It’s often thought of as an extension of continuous integration (CI), the practice of integrating code into a central and shared repository, automatically building and testing each new change.

Once the CI part of the process is complete, CD takes over to ensure the new release of software makes it into production and to its final users. Together, continuous integration and continuous delivery enable software teams to release well-tested and low-risk features faster.

Figure: A CI/CD Pipeline

While CI/CD is a great concept on paper, implementing both - CI and CD - remains elusive to many. A recent study by the CD Foundation found that, “47% of developers use either continuous integration or deployment, but only one in five use both continuous integration and deployment approaches to automate all building, testing, and deployment of code to production.”

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