ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test 2025 - Free DevOps Practice Questions and Exam Preparation Guide

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development practice that ensures code changes are automatically prepared for a production release. One of its primary characteristics is that, although the deployment process is automated up to the point of production, a manual approval step is often required before the code is actually released into production. This allows teams to verify and validate changes before they go live, ensuring that everything is functioning as intended and meets business goals or compliance requirements.

In contrast, Continuous Deployment takes this a step further by completely automating the release process without requiring any manual intervention. Anytime code passes the automated testing phase, it is immediately deployed to production. This swift approach allows teams to release updates and features more rapidly and frequently, reducing the time between development and user feedback.

The other choices do not accurately capture the distinction between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Continuous Delivery is not limited to specific types of applications, nor does it primarily focus on testing environments; it encompasses a wide range of applications and environments. Moreover, the frequency of integrations is not a defining factor between the two practices, as both Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment rely on regular integration of code changes.