Continuous Delivery or CD is a software development practice that enables teams ensure that their code is always in a deployable state. Even when a large number of developers are making changes to the code, Continuous Delivery ensures that the latest code with the changes is always ready to be deployed.

Implementing Continuous Delivery is often complemented with Continuous Integration, which ensures that the latest code is always correct. Adding Continuous Quality in the development pipeline alongside these two processes ensures that code is defect-free in addition to being correct.

What are the benefits of Continuous Delivery?

• Continuous Delivery helps lower the risk of releases. It is straightforward to achieve zero-downtime deployments by implementing patterns like blue-green deployments.
• Since it is trivial to deploy a new version of software, the time to market is reduced dramatically. Instead of getting tied to traditional long release-cycles, engineering teams can easily push small changes to production, gather feedback from real users, and iterate.
• By automating the mundane steps in software delivery pipeline, developers can focus more on qualitative review and increase the quality of software.