CDAF provides a loose coupling for core CI & CD objectives. The pipeline tool is used to orchestrate these processes, e.g. CI and CD.
The CI process gathers files from source control, then uses the CDAF CI entry point to produce the release package. The pipeline tool then stores the release package for reuse in subsequent deploy processes.
After the CI process, the pipeline tool may perform additional value add processes that are not directly related to delivery, i.e. publishing test results or code coverage.
The pipeline then retrieves the release package, and then triggers one or more deployments to promote a release to production. This is the CD process.
The triggering of each stage of the promotion can be immediate (indicated with ✓ in the diagram above) or require a manual approval (✅), but it is expected the deployment process itself is fully automated once it has been triggered.