Chapter 8: Continuous Delivery Pipeline

1. Production, staging, QA, development.
2.  Staging is the pre-production environment used to test software before the release; QA is a separate environment used by the QA team and the dependent applications.
3. Performance, load, stress, scalability, endurance, security, maintainability, recovery.
4. No, but it should be explicit which are part of the pipeline and which are not (and for those that are not, there still should be some automation and monitoring around).
5. Semantic versioning, timestamp-based, hash-based.
6. Smoke test is a very small subset of acceptance tests whose only purpose is to check that the release process is completed successfully.