What is the difference between Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery?

They often get conflated when talking about a “CI/CD pipeline”; and honestly it wasn’t something I’ve stopped to consider before. The question seems easy to answer, but I wanted to make sure I did my research.

After all, semantics are important.

So… what better an opportunity to learn the differences than now?

The general consensus

A solid article highlighting the differences is from Atlassian, where the key distinction is that continuous delivery means you can deploy changes to clients quickly and consistently, but not necessarily automatically.

Continuous deployment, on the other hand, does goes the extra step and deploys code to production once it has passed through the CI pipeline. No manually triggering a deploy. If the code is green, it goes to prod.

I would personally argue that delivery ties into the idea of always being shippable; that you should be able to deploy at any time, not just frequently.