Importance of Continuous Deployment and automation

Continuous delivery/deployments form the Ops part of your DevOps toolchain. So, while your developers are continuously building and pushing your code and your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline is building, testing, and publishing the builds to your artifact repository, the Ops team will deploy the build to the test and staging environments. The QA team are the gatekeepers who will ensure that the code meets a certain quality, and only then does the Ops team deploy the code to production.

Now, for organizations that have implemented only the CI part, the rest of the activities are manual. For example, operators will pull the artifacts and run commands to do the deployments manually. Therefore, your deployment's velocity will depend on the availability of your Ops team to do it. As the deployments are manual, the process is error-prone, and human beings tend to make mistakes in repeatable jobs.

One of the essential principles...