What is Continuous Deployment?
Continuous Deployment takes Continuous Delivery one step further: every change that passes all stages of production pipeline testing is released to customers automatically, without human approval.
How Does Continuous Deployment Work?
Code is automatically built, tested, and, if all checks pass, deployed directly into production environments. There’s no need for manual release approval.
What Are the Benefits of Continuous Deployment?
- Rapid delivery of improvements to customers.
- Immediate feedback on the impact of changes.
- Maximum automation reduces human error.
- Enables true DevOps and agile practices.
How Can Continuous Deployment Reduce Mean Time to Resolution?
Failures are immediately visible after deployment, tied to small code changes, allowing extremely fast identification and remediation.
What are the Challenges of Continuous Deployment?
- High risk if tests are insufficient or flaky.
- Requires robust monitoring and rollback strategies.
- May require feature flagging to manage in-progress work.
Leading Tools – of Continuous Deployment
These tools automate the final stage of the CI/CD pipeline, enabling code changes that pass automated tests to be deployed into production environments seamlessly:
- Harness – An AI-powered continuous delivery platform offering canary deployments, feature flags, and automatic rollback.
- Argo CD – A declarative GitOps continuous deployment tool purpose-built for Kubernetes applications.
- GitHub Actions (with Deployments) – Integrates CI and deployment automation directly into GitHub repositories, enabling streamlined DevOps workflows.
- Octopus Deploy – Provides robust deployment automation for on-prem and cloud applications, with support for release orchestration and approvals.
LOCI – Enhances continuous deployment workflows by integrating post-build binary analysis into pipelines, ensuring software quality and runtime safety before reaching production.
