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Explore Release Pipeline

A release pipeline takes artifacts and releases them through stages and finally into production.


The first component in a release pipeline is an artifact:

  • Artifacts can come from different sources.
  • The most common source is a package from a build pipeline.
  • Another commonly seen artifact source is, for example, source control.
  • A manual trigger, where people start to release by hand.
  • A scheduled trigger, where a release is triggered based on a specific time.
  • A continuous deployment trigger, where another event triggers a release. For example, a completed build.

Furthermore, a release pipeline has a trigger: the mechanism that starts a new release.

A trigger can be:

Another vital component of a release pipeline is stages or sometimes called environments. It's where the artifact will be eventually installed. You can have many stages (environments); part of the release strategy is finding the appropriate combination of stages.

Another component of a release pipeline is approval. People often want to sign a release before installing it in the environment. In more mature organizations, this manual approval process can be replaced by an automatic process that checks the quality before the components move on to the next stage.

Finally, we have the tasks within the various stages. The tasks are the steps that need to be executed to install, configure, and validate the installed artifact.

 

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