CI/CD & Deployment Glossary

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

Pipeline
An automated, ordered set of actions that builds, tests and ships your code on every change.
Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build (a bundle, image or static site) that can be deployed or routed to a domain.
Sandbox
An isolated, on-demand environment for running, previewing or testing code without touching production.
Distribution
A routing layer that maps a domain (or path) to a target such as an artifact, sandbox or external URL.
Rollback
Reverting a deployment to a previously known-good version after a bad release.
Blue-green deployment
Running two identical environments and switching traffic from the old (blue) to the new (green) instantly.