Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery means every merged change is, by default, in a shippable state — a human decision (or, in continuous deployment, no decision at all) is the only thing standing between a commit and production. The discipline this demands is upstream of the deploy pipeline itself: if main isn't always releasable, "delivery" is a lie and someone will eventually hit "deploy" on a broken build.

Most teams' real bottleneck isn't the deploy mechanics, it's the courage to trust that main is always good enough to ship.

Every commit on the default branch should be deployable at any moment — if it isn't, that's a defect in the pipeline, not a reason to slow down releases.

1. Make "always releasable" a property of main, not a hope