What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

Continuous Delivery (CD) ensures that every code change that passes automated tests is in a deployable state and can be released to production at any time with a single button click (or manual approval gate). The deployment itself is a human decision. Continuous Deployment takes this further — every change that passes all automated tests is automatically deployed to production with no human intervention. Continuous Deployment requires extremely high confidence in your automated test suite, monitoring, and rollback capabilities. Most organizations practice Continuous Delivery (with manual approval for production) rather than fully automated deployment, especially in regulated industries. Both require a robust automated pipeline; the difference is only the final gate before production.