What is the Difference Between Continuous Delivery and DevOps?

Continuous delivery refers to an approach to software development that facilitates rapid, dependable software updates. In contrast, DevOps is an umbrella term covering concepts, practices, procedures, and tools designed to bring development and operations teams closer together to speed product production. Both concepts share similarities, and while their implementation may vary slightly, both may employ similar strategies or approaches altogether.

Understanding the differences between them is essential to choosing the best approach and implementing it, though identifying precise distinctions is not always straightforward. We hope the following article will help you clear the confusion.

What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous delivery is an engineering method whereby modifications to code are made before they are pushed to production. Be aware that your code has to undergo automated unit tests, integration testing, unit testing, and testing of the system before being released into production. 

Transitioning between continuous integration and continual delivery is typically performed automatically, with automated tests at the integration, unit, and systems levels.

Automated tests offer more comprehensive verification. Developers can update their tests and identify bugs before releasing them. In addition, when integrated into an automated release method, they create the perfect combination to create an efficient and seamless process.

In the case of releases available in the staging environment, continuous release lets developers publish at any time they choose, with one click of a button. An update can only begin once a person has decided to start it. Continuous delivery can only occur after this decision has been made.

Benefits of Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery has a range of advantages for companies that implement it. This includes:

• By automating the creation, testing, and deployment procedure, businesses can release new features or update bugs more quickly without any risk. 
• Through the continuous integration of code changes, developers can spot and fix issues early in the development process, which improves the overall functionality of the application or software.
• Organizations can ensure that their software is of the highest quality and reliability only by automating tests and verifying that the code passes these tests.
• By identifying and correcting issues early in the development process, businesses can reduce production-line repair costs significantly.

What is DevOps?

Since agile developers were more proficient in creating and deploying code as they became more adept at writing code, segregating Quality Assurance and DevOps teams resulted in inefficiency. The DevOps method was developed to tackle this problem. 

DevOps is a culture of collaboration with a range of ideas, practices, tools, technologies, and techniques that can help improve the speed of the creation process. The primary culture shift centers on effective communications, integration, and better teamwork to deliver high-quality products.

DevOps is a method that focuses on collaboration and communication between testers and developers. This is essential because, in traditional environments, developers lack an understanding of quality assurance processes and the limitations of standard performance indicators, such as on-base plus slugging. In software development, On-base plus Slugging limitations symbolically represent the limitations of traditional metrics used to assess software quality. These metrics alone cannot convey the complexity of software's efficiency. Thus, DevOps is a more holistic method to overcome these issues by encouraging continuous feedback and extensive testing.

In addition, as they work across multiple projects, the QAs and Operations employees are usually unaware of the software's business requirements. DevOps development services help organizations streamline their software development processes, enabling continuous and rapid deployment.

Benefits Of DevOps

There are many advantages to introducing DevOps in your company's culture.

• The tools and practices of DevOps enable teams to launch software quicker by automating the development and release process. This reduces the time needed to roll out new enhancements, bug fixes, and upgrades.
• Continuous testing and deployment ensure the software's quality and can spot problems and bugs early during development.
• DevOps practices like containerization and cloud computing allow businesses to respond quickly to their customer's changing needs and expand their applications to accommodate those demands.
• DevOps teams manage the entire development duration and ensure software security. This includes implementing security testing strategies and incident response procedures and using tools to guard against security threats.
• DevOps teams utilize metrics and feedback to continually evaluate and enhance the efficiency of their processes and software.
• By identifying and fixing issues earlier in the development process, businesses can lower the expense of repairing bugs during production and enhance their overall return on investment.

Also Read: TechOps vs DevOps: A Must-Read Comparison for IT Organizations

Key Differences Between Continuous Delivery and DevOps

Let us look at the main differences between continuous delivery and DevOps.

Definition

• Continuous Delivery

The CD is a collection of practices and principles designed to assist team members in the development process and ensure the steady release of frequently updated code. CI/CD is the continual automatization and tracking of all phases of an application's lifecycle, from integration to testing and, finally, the software's release and installation. Implementing CI/CD is a best-practice workflow for DevOps teams to adhere to.

Companies rely on the CI/CD pipelines to reduce bottlenecks within production and delivery. Continuous integration is a great way to build, integrate, and test code in a development environment. Continuous delivery is a way to ensure efficient production deployment.

• DevOps

DevOps is a term coined using the words 'development' and operations. The collaborative culture is an array of concepts, methods, practices, and tools that improve the efficiency of product development. DevOps insists on efficient coordination, communication, and collaboration between the operations and development teams. It helps them concentrate on producing quality products.

DevOps methods help companies create their production teams and processes to build software that facilitates fast and consistent deployment. DevOps is about reducing inefficiency and creating platforms that can scale quickly and perform for the long term.

Scope

• Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is an approach to software development that focuses on automating the procedure of transferring code changes into production systems. Its primary goal is to ensure that the code remains deployable, allowing regular and reliable updates. 

Continuous delivery encompasses the automation of build processes, conducting automated tests, and deploying software upgrades with minimal manual effort.

Ensuring that a pipeline is consistent between development and production, continuous delivery reduces the risk associated with deploying new software, speeding up the time between releases and enhancing the overall quality of software. 

This method helps teams identify and resolve issues early during the development process, ensuring that every update is secure and adheres to high-quality standards. Continuous delivery works with continuous integration based on automated building and testing methods that CI facilitates. Ultimately, continuous delivery aims to enhance software deployment's effectiveness and reliability, enabling a more flexible and responsive development environment.

• DevOps

DevOps practices are focused on enabling immediate and efficient solutions to problems in the production process that would otherwise be complicated due to the culture of overspecialization among operational and development teams.

DevOps aims to reduce the boundaries between the operations and engineering teams via cross-training and flexible communication channels. This helps increase communication and collaboration and provides these teams with an understanding of each other's procedures and tasks.

Purpose

• Continuous Delivery

It makes all changes to the application's source code in a single repository. Then, it runs automated tests using the repository. This ensures the application's complete development and makes it ready for launch.

The main purpose behind CD is to facilitate the quick, reliable, and automated release of updates to products. The process helps reduce problems increasing users' satisfaction. A solid CD pipeline enhances the quality of products while maintaining the development speed provides value for operational and product teams in development, and increases company value.

• DevOps

DevOps solves a significant issue. Many organizations face a wide gap between the team working on operations and the development team during software development. A lack of communication and collaboration between both teams can cause development problems due to insufficient cooperation. DevOps aims to combine the operations and development functions and bring together all the operations that occur during the production process.

DevOps creates a more flexible, effective, efficient, and streamlined software production system. It aims to establish and maintain a collective culture among teams and businesses, thereby establishing shared procedures and increasing collaboration. In simple terms, a solid DevOps culture can help teams reach the same business objectives instead of departments working separately for the objectives.

Process

• Continuous Delivery

Developers who use continuous integration techniques integrate their updates to the core application as frequently as possible. The changes are then validated by developing a build that undergoes automated testing. This method helps teams avoid problems that could occur if they waited until the release date to integrate modifications.

Continuous delivery extends continuous integration. It involves automatically delivering any code update during the test and production phases. Continuous delivery lets teams benefit from automated release and testing processes and deploy the most recent software at the click of a button.

• DevOps

Implementing the DevOps method requires the execution of the following procedure: automating every aspect of development, including workflows, testing new codes, and setting up infrastructures to minimize unnecessary work and waste of time. 

It also includes iterative development that involves writing small bits of code over a set period, to create sub-releases and increase the velocity and frequency of deployments.

Continuous improvement is achieved through constant testing, responding to feedback, and learning from the mistakes made to maximize efficiency, cost, and the speed of deployment. It also helps in unifying teams, breaking silos, encouraging the exchange of information among IT development and operations, and quality control.

The primary aspect of the DevOps procedure is continuous testing, monitoring, and feedback implementation accompanied by smaller but faster deployments. It helps enterprises connect IT professionals, developers, and end-users closer to one another.

Stages

• Continuous Delivery

Every stage must be completed before the next stage begins. To guarantee an error-free procedure, each stage is checked for discrepancies. The feedback is communicated directly to delivery personnel if a mistake is found.

• First Phase 

The source stage is the very beginning of the CI/CD process. It's responsible for initiating events like the unit test and compilation. This action occurs when changes (such as a change in status or an update) occur within the program itself or the central repository of code. The source control stage is responsible for source management and version control. It is accountable for keeping track of the changes. 

• Second Phase

The next step is the build phase when the source code is infused with dependencies, and a development executable instance can be created. This phase deals with build artifacts, software build handling, and various other types of objects that can be built, including Docker containers. If the build does not succeed during this point, it could indicate an issue with the source code.

Users can centralize the procedure for storing artworks using a single artifact repository, such as JFrog and Yarn. Azure Artifacts and various other cloud-based options can also be employed. The cloud-based solutions allow users to return to the earlier build version when problems occur with the latest version. Software such as Gradle, Jenkins, AWS Code Build, Azure Pipelines, and Travis CI support the build phase. 

• Third Phase

The test phase is the automated testing of software. It also validates its behavior to keep bugs away from users. This stage includes a range of testing, including functional and integration testing. Problems with the software are also reported during this phase. Automation testing tools used for this stage are Appium, Selenium, PHPUnit, Jest, Playwright, and Puppeteer.

If a package passes through all three phases, it is prepared for the Continuous delivery deployment phase. It will first be tested in an experimental environment to provide quality control, then deployed for users in the production stage. Any of the deployment methods, such as blue-green deployments, canary deployments, and in-place deployments, can be used for deploying the application/software.

• DevOps

The DevOps cycle covers continuous integration, ongoing development, and many other steps. The stage of continuous development involves planning and software code. The stakeholders collectively determine the direction of the plan in the next stage. After that, the process of developing the software code may start.

• Continuous Integration

Continuous integration involves creating code to support the creation of new functions and then integrating it into the existing code. Integration can take place every day or weekly. Any issues may be identified early on when all the commits are completed. This phase includes compilation, tests for integration, unit tests, packaging, and code review.

• Continuous Testing

During the continuous testing phase, flaws are examined using automated tools such as JUnit, TestNG, and Selenium. Quality analysts utilize these tools to rigorously test several code bases in parallel and verify that no bugs in the functionality are present.

• Continuous Deployment

At this point, the Docker containers are utilized to replicate the testing environments. When the tests are complete, an automatic report can be created. The code can then continue to be integrated into the build program in place.

• Continuous Monitoring

The ongoing monitoring phase includes all operational elements in the DevOps procedure. Documents about the software's usage are generated and then processed to identify patterns and difficulties. The software's operational features are combined with automatic monitoring tools to create a true ongoing procedure. Output is large documents or a large amount of data. System errors like "low memory" and "server not reachable" are dealt with at this point, increasing the software's security and availability.

• Continuous Feedback

Continuous feedback is a key element to constantly improving the application or software. This can be achieved by examining how the program works. By establishing a method to collect continuous feedback from the software's day-to-day operation, programmers can make improvements in the subsequent version with greater efficiency. The program is applied to production servers at the stage of continuous deployment, which also concerns the proper usage of the code across every server.

How to Implement CI/CD in a DevOps Culture?

Once you better understand the difference between them, you'll be interested in learning more about what successful implementation requires. DevOps and continuous delivery will significantly increase the efficiency of teams that develop software. However, they do require some work to integrate fully into a team. 

One of the main benefits of incorporating CI/CD in the DevOps framework is faster feedback, which allows an ongoing improvement in the application quality. Effective fixes for bugs make the app more attractive to the user and improve the credibility of the organization that developed it.

However, when implementing this model in your business, there are specific problems to remember that can be resolved through DevOps consulting. First, you must make use of CI/CD software. This is the principal instrument for regulating and automating all other processes and services. 

Continuous Delivery is closely linked to the system for managing source controls, which allows efficient collaboration on source code. CI/CD tools automate the tasks related to source code, including creating, testing, and deploying updates. This helps to simplify workflows and aids in team collaboration by ensuring the code changes are incorporated smoothly and in a consistent manner. By linking continuous delivery and source control, teams can collaborate more efficiently, reducing manual work and minimizing mistakes in the deployment process. This integration allows for seamless updates and increases overall efficiency.

While an application server could be located on a server/virtual machine, containers are typically the better choice. If you're determined to follow a DevOps method, including the CI CD pipeline in your process is best. The pipeline can help team members spot mistakes and resolve any bugs that might be feasible while reducing the amount of downtime you experience to an absolute minimum.

Conclusion

Continuous delivery is a method of making software more accessible to create and deploy. In contrast, DevOps is an approach for improving collaboration and communication between operations and development teams. 

Both methods aim to increase the speed and efficiency of software updates; however, they use different methodologies and tools. CI/CD utilizes automated testing and continuous integration. DevOps employs containers, infrastructure as code, and automation of infrastructure provisioning. Tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are used in the DevOps method.