The "CD" in CI/CD can be defined as: Continuous Delivery - updates are delivered to staging environments for further testing or assessment Continuous Deployment - updates are delivered directly to the production environment, improving timeliness Whether organizations prefer continuous deployment or continuous delivery depends on their risk tolerance, since not every organization is willing to automate production deployments of any code that successfully passes the CI/CD pipeline. ActiveState's State of CI/CD survey offers insights into the benefits and drawbacks of continuous integration versus continuous delivery, as well as identifying some of the key issues with CI/CD implementations.