practice

CI/CD

also called Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery

Merging work continuously into a shared trunk with automated verification, and keeping every commit in a state that could be released.

pipelinedeploymentautomation

Two distinct disciplines that get bundled. Continuous integration is about merge frequency: everyone integrates to trunk at least daily, and an automated build plus test suite gates it. Its enemy is the long-lived branch, which converts many small merges into one large risky one.

Continuous delivery is about release readiness: every commit that passes the pipeline is deployable, so releasing becomes a business decision rather than an engineering event. Continuous deployment goes further and ships automatically.

The architectural connection is direct: deployment independence is a property of the architecture, not of the pipeline. If two services must be released together, no amount of pipeline engineering will give you independent delivery — the boundary has to change first.