🧠 Core Idea
Continuous Delivery (CD) enables teams to ship software on demand through automation.
However, release approvals exist to control whether a delivery happens, not how the deployment technically runs.
🔄 Deployment vs Release
⚙️ Deployment
- Purely technical
- Installing software into environments
- Automated scripts, pipelines, infrastructure actions
🧭 Release
- Organizational decision-making
- Governance, compliance, trust
- Determines if software is allowed into production
👉 Key point:
- Deployment executes code.
- Release approvals authorize delivery.
🛡️ Why Release Approvals Exist
Release approvals provide governance, not execution logic.
They help organizations:
- Meet compliance requirements (example: SOX four-eyes principle)
- Enforce organizational trust
- Manage risk during early CD adoption
🧑⚖️ Especially early on, teams rely on human validation before production releases.
📈 Evolution of Approvals in CD
🟡 Early Stage CD
- Manual approvals before production
- Human confidence building
- Slower delivery velocity
🟢 Mature CD
- Automated quality gates
- Policy-as-code
- Security, testing, and compliance checks
- Minimal or no manual intervention
✅ Confidence replaces caution as automation proves reliable.
🧩 Designing Effective Release Approvals
🎯 Purpose
Define why approval is needed:
- ✅ Compliance and audit controls
- 🔗 Dependency coordination
- 🧑💼 Authority sign-off (security, product, risk)
👥 Approvers
Identify who must approve:
- Product Owners
- Security Officers
- Code Reviewers
⚠️ Reality check:
Approver availability directly affects deployment speed.
⏱️ Timing
Decide when approval happens:
- Before pipeline execution
- Mid-pipeline with a hard stop
- After build but before production
- Decoupled via scheduled releases
💡 Not every approval must block automation.
🚦 Problems With Manual Approvals
❌ Introduce delays
❌ Break pipeline flow
❌ Create bottlenecks
❌ Scale poorly
Manual approvals solve governance problems but often hurt delivery performance.
✅ Smarter Alternatives
🔍 Shift Approvals Left
- Validate changes earlier in source control
- PR reviews, policy checks, automated scans
- Faster feedback, same governance
📅 Scheduled Deployments
- Approval happens earlier
- Deployment runs later automatically
- No real-time human dependency
🤖 Automated Release Gates
- Test coverage thresholds
- Security scans
- Compliance policies
- Quality metrics
🎯 Result:
Control without friction
🏁 Final Takeaway
✔ Release approvals decide if software ships
✔ Deployments decide how it ships
✔ Manual approvals are a starting point, not the destination
✔ Automation and release gates scale better than humans
🚀 Mature Continuous Delivery replaces trust checks with proven, automated confidence.
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