Comparisons
Pairs that get conflated in real conversations, and a few that get treated as synonyms when one is a prerequisite for the other. Neither column wins — what decides is the change in front of you. Each record leads with the confusion, because the confusion is why the record exists.
Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment
Both are abbreviated "CD", so teams claim one and mean the other. The consequential difference is not the button: continuous deployment removes the human review that was quietly compensating for weak automated verification, so it demands stronger canary analysis, automated rollback and small changes. A team that flips the switch without those does not get faster delivery, it gets faster incidents. Conversely, a team with a manual gate that nobody exercises has continuous delivery on paper and batched releases in practice.
Use continuous delivery when every commit that passes the pipeline is provably deployable, but a human still chooses when it goes.
Use continuous deployment when every commit that passes the pipeline goes to production automatically, with no human step.
| Dimension | Continuous delivery | Continuous deployment |
|---|---|---|
| Human step | Yes — a promote decision | No — passing the pipeline is the decision |
| What the pipeline must prove | That the artifact is deployable | That the artifact is safe to expose to users unattended |
| Required safety net | Rollback procedure and someone watching | Automated rollout analysis with a defined abort condition, plus automated rollback |
| Typical batch size | Whatever accumulates between promotions | One change |
| Failure mode | The gate becomes a queue and changes batch up again | A bad change reaches users before a human is involved at all |
| Good fit | Regulated changes, coupled releases, thin automated verification | Mature verification, small services, strong signals, flags available |