CI/CD

Continuous integration means changes are merged often and automatically built and tested as they are. Continuous delivery builds on that: whatever passes the checks is releasable at any time. The point is not speed for its own sake but the size of the step - small, frequent changes are individually comprehensible and easy to attribute when something breaks.

That inverts a common intuition. Rare, large releases feel safer but carry more risk: when something breaks after four weeks, hundreds of changes are candidate causes. Ship daily and you usually have one.

The pipeline is also the natural home for everything otherwise forgotten. Linting, type checking, tests, dependency and container scans, performance budgets - all of it runs on every change without anyone having to remember. What is not in the pipeline gets skipped under deadline pressure.

Just as important as the way forward is the way back. A deployment without a tested rollback is a one-way street. So we build both and rehearse the return path before it is needed in earnest.