Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous Deployment (CD) is a software engineering practice in which every change that passes automated tests is automatically released to the production environment. It's the final stage of a highly automated pipeline, which includes Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery. In this model, human intervention is only required to stop a deployment, not to initiate it. This allows teams to deliver new features and bug fixes to users rapidly and with high confidence.

Example: A software team makes a small update to an application's login feature. Once the developer commits the code, the automated pipeline takes over. It runs all unit and integration tests. If every test passes, the pipeline automatically deploys the new code to the live server. This means the updated login feature is available to users within minutes, without a QA engineer or release manager having to manually approve or trigger the deployment.