The importance of CD and automation

CD forms the Ops part of your DevOps toolchain. So, while your developers are continuously building and pushing code and your CI pipeline is building, testing, and publishing the builds to your artifact repository, the Ops team will deploy the build to the test and staging environments. The QA team is the gatekeeper that will ensure that the code meets a certain quality, and only then will the Ops team deploy the code to production.

Now, for organizations implementing only the CI part, the rest of the activities are manual. For example, operators will pull the artifacts and run commands to do the deployments manually. Therefore, your deployment’s velocity will depend on the availability of your Ops team to do it. As the deployments are manual, the process is error-prone, and human beings tend to make mistakes in repeatable jobs.

One of the essential principles of modern DevOps is to avoid toil. Toil is nothing but repeatable jobs that...