Continuous delivery (CD) is an extension of CI, where the focus is on automating the software delivery process so that teams can confidently deploy their code to production at any time. With this automation, the teams can be confident that they can release whenever they need to without any manual intervention.
The application operations team creates a deployment pipeline to enable CD. A deployment pipeline is an automated system that deploys the application artifacts to the lower environment and runs the corresponding tests on the deployed application in the given environment.
The application artifact is built once and deployed many times. The application metadata is unique to the deployment environment, and that metadata can be supplied by the deployment pipeline:
In the preceding workflow, once the application artifact...