Glossary · Automation software engineering and architecture
Continuous deployment
German: Kontinuierliche Produktionsbereitstellung
In software engineering, continuous deployment is the practice of automatically releasing every change that passes all stages of the automated pipeline to production, without a manual approval step.
- Software engineering
In one sentence
Continuous deployment automatically releases every change that passes the automated pipeline to production, without manual approval.
Example
A cloud dashboard for machine fleet monitoring is deployed several times a day; each change that passes the tests goes live automatically.
How it applies
- Engineering: Continuous deployment requires strong automated tests, monitoring and fast Rollback capability. Techniques such as Feature flag switches and Canary deployment limit the impact of defects that still slip through.
- Industrial context: It is suitable for cloud services, web portals and some IT-level applications. For software running on machines and in plants, customer approval, production schedules and safety considerations usually require a manual release step.
- Documentation: When software changes several times a day, documentation cannot be published as fixed manual revisions for each change. Use continuously published online documentation, change logs generated from the pipeline, and flag features that are not yet visible to all users.
Continuous deployment vs. continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) keeps every change releasable but leaves the release decision to people; continuous deployment removes that step. Changes to safety-related functions always need verification, validation and a documented release decision; automation of the pipeline does not replace them.