All glossary terms
Cross-cutting
Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment automatically deploys every change that passes the test suite into production, no human gate between merging code and serving traffic. CD assumes high test coverage, automated rollback, and observability strong enough to catch issues in production within minutes.
Distinguishing terms: continuous integration (merge to main frequently), continuous delivery (every change is deployable), continuous deployment (every change is automatically deployed). Most B2B teams stop at continuous delivery, they want the option to ship but keep a human in the loop for compliance or change-management reasons. Consumer-scale teams (Amazon, Netflix) deploy thousands of times a day via full CD.