Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deploy

There is a subtle difference between the terms Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deploy although these terms are used interchangeably in the industry. Continuous Deploy is the ability to deploy your changes or patches continually to production in an automated fashion whereas Continuous Delivery is the ability to have working deployable code ready all the time but necessarily deploy to production.

Both of these process use continuous integration to compile, build, test and deploy the code. There is this notion in Silicon Valley that you need to deploy your code to production x number of times everyday, but this is not feasible in industries like finance and insurance. You need to come up with new ways to hide your features in production which is usually achieved by creating feature toggles (configuration file that defines a bunch of toggles for various features that you have pending).