Continuous delivery and Continuous deployment

Continuous Delivery: The application is automatically built, tested, and prepared for release, but the final step of deploying the software into production is done manually. This means that the software is always ready for deployment, but the decision to deploy is a deliberate, manual process by the team, giving them control over when to release new features or updates.

Continuous deployment: Continuous deployment takes automation one step further. In this approach, every change that passes the automated tests is automatically deployed to production without human intervention. This means that any code that meets the criteria of testing and validation is pushed live automatically, enabling rapid and frequent releases, often multiple times per day.

In summary, continuous delivery provides an automated pipeline up to the point of deployment, while continuous deployment fully automates the entire process, including the final production release.