Glossary
CD
Meaning and details
CD is the discipline after CI: every commit that passes the pipeline is releasable, and in continuous deployment proper, it releases itself to production without a human pressing anything. The enabling investments are th...
CD meaning
Continuous delivery or deployment: keeping every change in a always-releasable state, and deploying it automatically once verified.
What is CD?
CD is the discipline after CI: every commit that passes the pipeline is releasable, and in continuous deployment proper, it releases itself to production without a human pressing anything. The enabling investments are the same ones CI demands, a fast trustworthy test suite, plus the pieces that make release boring: database migrations that never break the old version, feature flags to separate deploy from release, and health-check rollbacks that reverse a bad deploy in minutes.
Why it matters to an indie builder: deploy pain taxes everything. When releasing costs an evening and nerves, you batch changes, batches grow risky, risk makes you release less, and the death spiral ends in the quarterly big-bang deploy with its weekly tail of bugs. CD breaks the spiral by making each release tiny: one change, automated path to production, automatic rollback, and the cost of shipping drops to near zero, so you ship constantly and fix forward fast.
A concrete example: a checkout fix at 4pm. CI runs in six minutes, the pipeline deploys to production behind a flag at 4:10, the flag opens for 10 percent of traffic, dashboards stay green, 100 percent by 4:40. Total elapsed: under an hour, with a one-command retreat at every step. The same fix in a batch-deploy world waits for Thursday's release train, ships bundled with eleven other changes, and if it misbehaves, the rollback takes the other eleven with it, which is why nobody rolls back and instead hotfixes forward at midnight.
Common mistakes: CD without the safety net, auto-deploying code whose tests do not cover the money paths is optimism, not engineering, migrations that require the deploy to pause (expand-contract schema changes, deploy new code that writes both shapes, then clean up, keep old and new compatible at every step), no rollback drill (an untested rollback is a rumor, practice it on a Friday deliberately), and confusing continuous delivery with deploying faster to satisfy impatience, the point is smaller, safer changes, speed is the side effect. The devops blocks on IndieBoot, from CI to the PaaS layer, assemble into this loop in an afternoon.