---
display_name: Continuous Delivery (CD)
short_description: Continuous delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles without doing so manually.
topic: continuous-delivery
related: ci-cd, cicd, continuous-deployment, continuous-integration
wikipedia_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery
---
**Continuous delivery** (**CD**) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, following a pipeline through a "production-like environment", without doing so manually. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.

Continuous delivery contrasts with continuous deployment (also abbreviated CD), a similar approach in which software is also produced in short cycles but through automated deployments even to production rather than requiring a "click of a button" for that last step. As such, continuous deployment can be viewed as a more complete form of automation than continuous delivery.