Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, the automated pipeline that builds, tests, and ships code to production.
CI/CD is the combined discipline of Continuous Integration (every commit triggers an automated build + test) and Continuous Delivery (passing builds are automatically promoted toward production through staging gates). A mature CI/CD pipeline includes unit tests, integration tests, security scans, image signing, environment promotion, automated canary, and automated rollback. The point is to make every commit a deployable artifact and every deployment a low-risk event.
DORA metrics show that elite teams deploy multiple times per day with change-failure rates under 15%. Low-performing teams deploy quarterly with change-failure rates over 60%. The difference is almost entirely the maturity of the CI/CD pipeline, specifically the test gates and the automated rollback path. Investment here is the highest-leverage SRE work that doesn't get tagged as SRE work.
See the part of the platform that handles ci/cd in production.