CI, delivery and deployment are three things
The three terms people use interchangeably promise different things and cost different amounts.
Open this lesson in the learning hubKey points
- Continuous integration means everyone merges to mainline daily and every merge triggers an automated build and test run.
- Continuous delivery means every green build is releasable, but a human still decides when to ship it.
- Continuous deployment removes that decision: every commit that passes the pipeline reaches production on its own.
- Most teams that say CD mean delivery - deployment first needs rollback, feature flags and real monitoring.
- A build that runs nightly is not CI, because feedback the next morning no longer points at one change.
- Jenkins serves all three; what changes is how much of the path after the build you choose to automate.
CI verifies, delivery makes every build releasable, deployment removes the human - adopt them in that order.
This is a reading copy. The full lesson — with the visual explainer, the interactive lab and a Run button for the code — lives in the Jenkins CI/CD Course course, and every lesson in it is listed on the Jenkins CI/CD Course contents page.