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Discussion on: What's the difference: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment.

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Paula Santamaría • Edited

Excellent article (images were good too 😂).

I’m currently exploring the DevOps world and I wonder: is “continuous delivery” to a non-production environment a thing? I mean, having an environment where actual users can experience the latest changes without putting in danger their everyday operations.

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David J Eddy • Edited

Great question Paula, welcome to the wide (but sometimes ambiguous) world of DevOps.

To answer your question: Yes, I would call that a partial continuous deployment.

To alleviate the danger to users have the development team hide new features behind a 'feature flag'. An easy way to do this is have features release version based. The code is on production but not accessible until the environment's version is incremented.