Can you explain the differences between continuous integration and continuous deployment?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are practices in software development aimed at automating and speeding up the release of products.

• Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of frequently merging code changes into a shared repository. Each commit is automatically verified by building and testing to quickly identify errors and conflicts.

• Continuous Deployment (CD) is the automatic release of changes to the production environment after all tests and checks have passed successfully. This allows for rapid delivery of new features to users.

Thus, CI focuses on automating build and testing, while CD focuses on automating delivery and deployment.

Example:

• Developer pushes code to the repository.
• CI system runs build and tests.
• If all succeed, the CD system automatically deploys the update to the server.