Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

Question

I've heard both terms recently. There is even a book called continuous delivery. What is the difference between those two terms? Aren't they addressing the same issue?

Answer 1

Continuous deployment is about deploying every change that passes your automated test suite to production.

Continuous delivery it's only part of that. It enables you to deploy your software anytime the business wants, but it does not necessarily mean you deploy every change.

So in short, Continuous delivery means to be able to release at any point in time, but continuous deployment means to release every change automatically.

Hope this sheds some light into the discussion.