An outlook on CD
Eventually, your CI pipeline will work so well that you can fully trust it. It will prevent shipping broken code into production reliably, and at some point, you find yourself doing fewer and less-manual checks if the deployment went well. At that point, you could think about using CD: this describes the combination of tools and processes to deploy code to any environment automatically.
A usual workflow is that whenever changes get merged into a certain branch (for example, main
for the production environment), the CI/CD pipeline will be triggered automatically. If the changes pass all checks and tests, the process is trusted so much that the code gets deployed into the desired destination without testing the build result manually anymore.
If you ever had the opportunity to work in such an environment, you surely do not want to miss it. Besides a great CI/CD pipeline and 99% trust in it, it requires some more processes in place to quickly react if a deployment...