What is the main difference between the approaches of Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery in release automation?

The main difference between Continuous Delivery (CD) and Continuous Deployment is the level of automation in releasing changes to production:

• Continuous Delivery is a process where changes automatically pass all testing and preparation stages and are in a state ready for release. However, the actual release to production is done manually by the team.

• Continuous Deployment is a more advanced level where, after successful passing of all tests and checks, changes are automatically rolled out to production without human intervention.

Thus, Continuous Deployment is an extension of Continuous Delivery with full automation of the release process.