Continuous delivery or deployment

Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD) is a natural extension or offshoot of the CI process, taking each successful build, collecting all of the components involved, and either deploying it directly (typically for web and cloud-resident applications and systems), or taking whatever steps would be necessary to make the new build available for deployment—creating a final, end user or production-ready installation package, for example—but not actually deploying it.

A complete CD process will allow for the creation, update, or recreation of a production system based solely on information in a source control system. It also likely involves some Configuration Management and Release Management tools at the system administration side, and those may well impose specific requirements, functionally or architecturally, or both, on a system's design and implementation.