I always thought of CI to be a build server that pushes code directly to production automatically. I never liked how CI does away with the concept of a 'releas

I always thought of CI to be a build server that pushes code directly to production automatically. I never liked how CI does away with the concept of a 'release' with a specific version. To me CI is synonymous with SaaS products, specifically products whose job is to serve individual client requests via a front end. I've never understood how CI is supposed to work with different types of software that isn't so transactional, or when the transactions are much longer running than a single HTTP request.