Skip to main content

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?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DevOps - What and Why?

The very first question arises in the mind is " What is DevOps? " Few will say it combined team of Developers and Operations. Some will say it is a person "DevOps Engineer" who works with multiple teams to get the things done in corrective manner. Further questions comes in mind are: What is the corrective manner of doing things? How it is different from our "current" method of doing things? Do I need an extra set of tools for this? And, most important of them all, why should I use it? Let me tell you what I've learn in my 3 days of DevOps training. What is DevOps? DevOps is not a team, or tool, DevOps is a culture. It is a culture for collaboration, Integration and Communication between different cross functional teams for  Continuous Delivery . DevOps is not an additional team, but it is the existing team members who work together. It breaks the barrier between Infrastructure and Code at early stage. DevOps also encoura...
1 comment
Read more

Delivery cadence and three types of triggers

Both the release and stages make use of triggers. There are three types of triggers we recognize. Continuous deployment trigger You can set up this trigger on your release pipeline. Once you do that, your release pipeline will trigger every time a build completes, and a new release will be created. Scheduled triggers This speaks for itself, but it allows you to set up a time-based manner to start a new release—for example, every night at 3:00 AM or 12:00 PM. You can have one or multiple schedules per day, but it will always run at this specific time. Manual trigger With a manual trigger, a person or system triggers the release based on a specific event. When it's a person, it probably uses some UI to start a new release. When it's an automated process, some events will likely occur. You can trigger the release from another system using the automation engine   Navigation Traditional IT deployment cycle What is Continuous Delivery? What is release, and what is a deployment? Azure...
Post a Comment
Read more