What is a deployment pipeline and why does it matter?

A deployment pipeline should be able to give the developers autonomous ability to deploy their code in a repeatable and testable way. This minimised hand-offs and team dependencies, enabling faster deployment and/or fail fast/bug fixing.

A deployment pipeline can be separate to a testing or build pipeline.

First you want a build pipeline, that runs security and unit tests and builds a deployable artifact.

Second you want a deploy/testing pipeline, that may run more security (pen testing) and integration tests after deploying to an appropriate environment.

This second pipeline could deploy all the way to production given the correct Human in the loop gates/approvals and testing sign off.