The accepted answer to my question about "How does continuous integration relate to continuous delivery / deployment?" also explains the small difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment. It appears to be related to the answer to a question like "How do you want to deploy to production, whereas these are the (exclusive) options to pick from:
- Auto(matic).
- Manual.
I cannot imagine that there will be a poor "operator" at the other side of the DevOps wall, who is going to have to do something that corresponds to whatever that "manual" means ... My questions:
- Is my reference (in my question) to "distribute" versus "install" close to a possible implementation of such "manual"-thing? Here is a relevant quote of my related question:
- distribute to some target environment, using something like FTP (if standard copies cannot bridge the gap), but do not yet activate it in the target. That's what should be similar/close to continuous delivery, or not?
- install (or activate) in some target environment, combined with things like binds, stop/start operations, etc. That's what should be similar/close to continuous deployment, or not?
- What are other possible implementations of it?