Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment: What’s The Difference?

Technical people talk about continuously integrating, delivering, and deploying, but what does any of that mean? And what difference does it make?

What’s it all mean?

Continuous Integration lets lots of people work on one project at the same time, while merging their work together in a central place regularly. This maintains the most recent version, so everyone is checking in or out only the latest code.

Continuous Delivery means that when the continuously integrated code is tested and accepted, it gets pushed out to customers. The customers can then choose to manually deploy it or not.

Continuous Deployment means that same continuously integrated code is pushed out after testing and accepting, except that it gets automatically deployed for the customers.

What’s the difference?

Without continuous integration, you can’t have continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Simply put, continuous delivery and continuous deployment provide the product built with continuous integration.

Who cares?

You should! Since continuous integration, delivery, and deployment keep code clean and bug-free, it means you get your features faster, cleaner, and more successfully.

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.