What is the purpose of continuous deployment in the CI/CD lifecycle?

Continuous deployment is the CI/CD practice in which every code change that successfully passes automated tests and quality gates is automatically released to production. The purpose is to reduce lead time, accelerate delivery, and make deployments smaller, more frequent, and more repeatable. This differs from continuous delivery, where software is kept in a deployable state but production release may still require manual approval. Merging code changes into a central repository is continuous integration. Packaging code into a Docker container may be part of a pipeline, but it is not the defining purpose of continuous deployment. Maintaining a deployable state describes continuous delivery more closely than continuous deployment. From a security perspective, CI/CD must include guardrails such as code scanning, dependency checks, secrets detection, image scanning, and deployment policy enforcement. Rapid deployment without security checks can spread defects quickly, while secure CI/CD improves both speed and control. Reference/topics: Cloud Security 5.6, CI/CD; Identity Security 7.4, secrets management in CI/CD pipelines.