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What is release, and what is a deployment?

To understand the concepts and the technical implementation in many tools, you need to know how tool vendors define the difference between a release and a deployment.

A release is a package or container containing a versioned set of artifacts specified in a release pipeline in your CI/CD process. It also includes a snapshot of all the information required to carry out all the tasks and activities in a release pipeline, such as:

  • The stages or environments.
  • The tasks for each one.
  • The values of task parameters and variables.
  • The release policies such as triggers, approvers, and release queuing options.

On the other hand, Deployment is the action of running the tasks for one stage, which results in a tested and deployed application and other activities specified for that stage.

Starting a release starts each deployment based on the settings and policies defined in the original release pipeline. There can be multiple deployments of each release, even for one stage. When a release deployment fails for a stage, you can redeploy the same release to that stage.

When we want to separate the technical and functional release, we need to start with our software itself. The software needs to be built so that new functionality or features can be hidden from end users while it's running. A common way to do this is the use of Feature Toggles. The simplest form of a Feature Toggle is an if statement that either executes or doesn't execute a certain piece of code.

Once we've prepared our software, we must ensure that the installation won't expose any new or changed functionality to the end user.

When the software has been deployed, we need to watch how the system behaves. Does it act the same as it did in the past?

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