Continuous deployment
CD is the idea that code changes that successfully pass through your pipeline can be automatically deployed to a target environment. Although examples of continuously deploying to production exist, most enterprises prefer to target a development environment. A gated approach is adopted to move the changes through the various stages of development environment, test, staging, and, ultimately, production. CircleCI can facilitate gated deployment with approval workflows, which is covered later in this section.
In CircleCI, you need to implement a deploy job to deploy your image. You can deploy to many targets in this job, such as Google Cloud Run, Docker Hub, Heroku, Azure, or AWS ECS. Integration with these targets will involve multiple steps. At a high level, these steps are as follows:
- Configure an orb for your target environment, which provides the CLI tools required to deploy your software.
- Store login credentials or access keys specific...