Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

An automated pipeline that builds, tests, and ships code every time a developer submits a change.

Continuous integration is the habit of merging everyone's work together often and checking that it still works; "continuous deployment" carries that vetted work straight out to a hosting environment.

With CI/CD in place, a change can go from submitted to live in minutes, without anyone manually copying files. It's a core piece of DevOps, and it's how teams keep frequent deployments from becoming risky, hand-built events.