What is easier to implement and achieve: code integration automation or automatic deployment of ready changes to production?

Automating code integration (Continuous Integration, CI) is generally easier to implement and achieve than automatic delivery of ready changes to production (Continuous Delivery/Deployment, CD).

Reasons:

• CI focuses on automatically building, compiling, and running tests on every code change, which requires setting up a build server and test environment.
• CD requires a more complex infrastructure for safe deployment, configuration management, rollback, and monitoring in the production environment.

Thus, starting with automating code integration is simpler and faster, and then gradually moving to automatic delivery to production.