Deployment pipeline
The automated path a code change travels from commit to production, build, test, security scan, and progressive deployment stages, each a gate that must pass before the next. A well-designed deployment pipeline makes releasing a non-event: every change takes the same audited route, so deploying ten times a day is as safe as deploying once a month.
The deployment pipeline is the automated path from commit to production, and its design is a direct statement of how much a team trusts its own changes. Each stage, build, test, security scan, staging, production, is a gate that trades speed for confidence. The goal isn't maximal gating; it's the minimum set of gates that makes a deploy boring. A pipeline that's slow or flaky gets bypassed, which is how "we have CI/CD" comes to coexist with risky releases.