Decoupling deployment from release

Let's start this chapter by posing three questions:

1. Did you notice that the Deployment chapter is before the Testing chapter?
2. Do you find the typical definitions of continuous delivery versus continuous deployment unsatisfying?
3. How can a company possibly perform multiple deployments each day and still have any confidence that the system will continue to function properly?

I placed the Deployment chapter before the Testing chapter to emphasize the fact that we are shifting the activity of deployment all the way to the left on the life cycle timeline of any given bounded isolated component. In fact, I advocate deploying a new component all the way into production on the very first day of its development. This first deployment is just a boilerplate stub created from a well-crafted template or it may even be just an empty stack. Regardless...