Comparison
Build pipelinevsContinuous delivery
Build pipeline
a merge triggers a sequence of stages on someone else's machine, and the sequence is now the only way anything reaches production.
The automated sequence that turns a commit into a tested, published artefact and then into a deployment. It is infrastructure in its own right — it has uptime, capacity, credentials and a blast radius — and it is usually the most privileged system a team operates while receiving the least operational attention. Its slowness is a direct tax on every change, which is why build time is a reliability metric rather than a convenience one.
Full entry →Continuous delivery
every commit on main was releasable, and shipping was a decision rather than a project.
Keeping the software in an always-releasable state so that releasing is a business decision rather than an engineering effort. It is distinct from deploying every commit: the point is that you could, at any moment, within minutes. It changes what risk means, because small frequent releases fail smaller and are diagnosed faster than the quarterly one everyone dreads.
Full entry →