Guide: Continuous Delivery (CD)

What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which development teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

Why is Continuous Delivery Important?
CD reduces the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. It promotes a rapid and reliable feedback loop between developers and users, enabling the latter to enjoy the benefits of the new updates sooner.

How Does Continuous Delivery Work?
CD works by making extensive use of automation testing throughout the entire software development lifecycle. It ensures that, from the moment code is committed to the repository, automatic processes handles the build, integration, and testing processes.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Continuous Delivery
1. Understand the concept: You should be aware of what Continuous Delivery is and its key benefits, and how it works. Your knowledge of the processes involved is quintessential.
2. Be Familiar with the key terms: Make sure that you understand the common terminology associated with CD like deployment, release, build etc.
3. Understand the difference between CD and CI: Continuous Integration is a part of CD, and it's important to understand the difference. In general, CI deals with the build and initial code test part of the overall process while CD handles end-to-end from build to deployment.
4. Use real-life examples: Sometimes, simplifying the question using a real-life scenario can clarify what the question is asking, this applies particularly to CD where a practical approach is often required.