Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment automatically releases every change that passes the pipeline's automated tests directly to production, with no manual approval step — the most advanced end of the CI/CD spectrum, requiring very high confidence in the automated test suite, since there's no human safety net before release.
This is a meaningfully bigger commitment than continuous delivery — it requires trusting the automated pipeline enough that a passing test suite is treated as sufficient evidence to ship, with no human double-checking before real users see the change, which raises the bar considerably for test coverage and quality.
Teams practicing genuine continuous deployment typically compensate with strong production safety nets — feature flags to instantly disable a problematic change without a full redeploy, canary releases to limit initial blast radius, and comprehensive synthetic monitoring to catch problems within minutes of release, not hours.
