~/glossary

CI/CD & Deployment Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms behind modern software delivery.

8 terms7 lettersvendor-neutral

Build & packaging
Artifact
A build artifact is the immutable, versioned package produced by a CI pipeline - a static bundle, container image, jar or zip - that gets stored once and then deployed unchanged to every environment. Promoting the same artifact from staging to production is what makes "build once, deploy many" possible.

Deployment strategies
Blue-green deployment
Blue-green deployment runs two identical production environments side by side - one (blue) serving live traffic, the other (green) holding the new version. Once the green environment is tested and healthy, you flip the router so all traffic goes to it in one step. If anything breaks, you flip back to blue with the same switch.

Deployment strategies
Canary release
A canary release rolls a new version out to a small slice of traffic first, watches it for errors and regressions, and only promotes it to the full user base once it looks healthy. The early traffic - the "canary" - acts as a live warning signal, limiting the blast radius of a bad change.

Release management
Feature flag
A feature flag is a runtime switch in code that turns a piece of functionality on or off without redeploying. Teams use flags to ship code dark, expose features to a subset of users, run A/B tests, and instantly disable broken features - decoupling deployment from release and shrinking the blast radius of a bad change.

Automation
Pipeline
A pipeline is an automated, ordered sequence of steps that builds, tests and ships your code every time it changes. Each step runs only if the previous one succeeds, so a single commit can flow from source control to a live environment without manual handoffs.

Environments
Sandbox
A sandbox is an isolated, on-demand environment for running, previewing or testing code without touching production. It has its own resources and data, so you can experiment, review a pull request or reproduce a bug freely - and throw the whole environment away when you are done.

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