CI/CD - Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery?

If you search CI/CD on the internet some websites refer to CD as Continuous Deployment and some refer to it as Continuous Delivery.

But what is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?

Let's break this silo.

In Continuous Deployment, after Continuous Integration, the code is deployed directly on the environment whether it can be Dev, Stag, or Prod without any manual intervention. (Whenever you push the code on any code hosting platform(GitHub, GitLab, or any other), your build will run after that test cases will execute, and at last, the code will get deployed.)

Whereas, in Continuous Delivery, the code doesn’t deploy automatically on the environment and it requires manual intervention. (Whenever you push the code on any code hosting platform(GitHub, GitLab, or any other), your build will run after that test cases will execute, and if you want to deploy the code then you have to trigger the pipeline manually for deploying the code.)

When to use Continuous Deployment and when to use Continuous Delivery?

In environments like development and staging you can use Continuous Deployment and in a Production environment you can use Continuous Delivery so the code will not automatically be deployed in the production environment and a DevOps Engineer will trigger the Deployment pipeline manually which will deploy the code on the production environment.

Let me know in the comments what CD means to you and which CD you prefer Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment.