Is Continuous Deployment the holy grail of devops?

In a recent article on InfoQ, not only benefits but also challenges with regard to continuous deployment (CD) are discussed. Some of the key takeaways are:

• most changes that people talk about when they mention CD are trivial changes like minor tweaks, cosmetic fiddling or small bug fixes (Jim Bird)
• real challenge with CD is the non-zero cost of reverting a change which can easily get expensive once deployed to a production with users and valuable data (Jo Liss) 
• one of the biggest challenge with CD is getting ready to release all the time (Eric Ries) 
• one should push fewer commits to the server with a reasonable deployment delay in the order of five hours to two days (Jo Liss) 
• in order to realize the benefits of CD requires (Eric Ries) 
  • Dont push features, build in response to signal from customer 
  • Code in small batches 
  • Prefer functional tests over unit tests whenever possible 
  • Implement alerts and monitoring both at system and application level Tolerate unexpected errors exactly once and fix them immediately 

The full article can be found here.