'sign off' procedures, and 'automated deployments' are not different ends of the spectrum. Nobody who gives a shit about their product/service is deploying fro

'sign off' procedures, and 'automated deployments' are not different ends of the spectrum. Nobody who gives a shit about their product/service is deploying from a developer directly into production without any kind of, you know, code review, pipeline testing, etc. It's 'automated' in that you git push. The pipeline handles code reviews, sign-offs, etc., and then automatically deploys the approved code change. This isn't banned at all. Just randomly pushing shit to production is banned (separation of concerns, amongst other controls). You can still have everything be fully automated, just not fully autonomous. Someone reviewing a change and then clicking 'LGTM' is still an automated, continuously integrated and deployed system.