Comparison
Continuous deploymentvsRelease
Continuous deployment
the merge went to production on its own and nobody pressed anything.
Every change that passes the pipeline goes to production automatically, with no human gate. It is a step beyond continuous delivery and it requires more than confidence in the tests: progressive rollout, real monitoring and a fast automatic rollback, because the safety net is no longer a person. It is not correct everywhere, and the honest reason to skip it is usually regulatory or contractual rather than technical.
Full entry →Release
you flip the flag and users start getting the new behaviour, on code that has already been running in production for a week.
Exposing new behaviour to users. Separating it from deployment is the single highest-leverage change to a delivery process: deploys become routine and releases become a business decision with an instant off switch. It requires the code to be flag-guarded and both paths to be tested.
Full entry →