The Comparison of Continuous Integration, Deployment and the Delivery

What appears in title seems familiar? It should because these are the concepts (or you can say techniques) we use to deliver our products to stakeholders. Even though Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are the buzzwords today most people often misunderstands the difference among each. 

First we'll look at what each of these are,..

Continuous Integration

Requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository or branch frequently. Each check-in of code is verified by an automated build. The idea here is to detect problems early.

Advantages

• Detect issues early and address them
• No more long integration processes
• Quick stakeholder feed backs
• You can make sure your product is stable

Continuous Delivery

This is deploying into a environment but to a set of users which can be QA or some customers for continual review and inspection. This is somewhat similar to Continuous integration but this can feed business logic tests which cannot be automated always. Continuous delivery ensures that the product is always in release-ready state.

Continuous Deployment

Deployment or release the code to production environment as soon as its ready. Any testing is done prior to merging and in a production like environment. This should be a automated process where anyone could do it.

After a deploy logs must be inspected to detect if the key metrics are affected (such as response time). See how Atlassian do continuous deployment.

http://guides.beanstalkapp.com/deployments/best-practices.html

References

Thoughtworks - Continuous Integration

Differences between 3 practices by assembla

Continuous Delivery.com - Difference between Continous Delivery and Deployment

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