What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery keeps the product permanently releasable: every change that passes the automated pipeline could go to production on demand — the release decision becomes a business choice, not an engineering event. Its bolder sibling, continuous deployment, removes the choice: every green build ships automatically.
The prerequisite stack is unforgiving: continuous integration, deep test automation, and deployment pipelines. CD is less a practice you adopt than a certificate that your engineering discipline actually works.
Worked example
A ticketing platform reaches CD after a year of pipeline work: any Tuesday, marketing can ask "can we launch the group-booking feature today?" and the answer is "it's been deployable for two weeks — flip the flag." Launches now align with campaigns instead of engineering calendars, which is the entire business case for the pipeline investment.