DevOps Practices for Azure Infrastructure - Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment

In my previous post, I started the journey of implementing DevOps practices for infrastructure. I've proposed implementation for Continuous Integration practice, which covers the Create and Verify stages of the DevOps pipeline.

But Continuous Integration is just the first of several practices which should be implemented for a complete pipeline:

• Continuous Planning
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Deployment
• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Operations
• Continuous Monitoring

In this post, I want to focus on Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment practices which are there to pick up where Continuous Integration has finished and continue through the Package and Release stages of the pipeline.

Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment

Quite often, when I'm discussing Software Development Life Cycle with teams, there is confusion around Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Teams will often say that they are doing CI/CD and when I ask about the CD part the terms Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are being used interchangeably. A lot of marketing "What is DevOps" articles also don't help by confusing the terms. So what is the difference?

In short, Continuous Delivery is about making artifacts ready for deployment and