Deploying

Deploying is the act of moving a software artifact from development into a production environment where it can be accessed by users. It is distinct from releasing, which is the public availability of a product or feature; deployment concerns the technical steps and environments involved, while release concerns timing and communication.

Typical deployments follow a pipeline that may include building and packaging, automated tests, configuration and secret management, and deployment to a sequence of environments such as development, test, staging, and production. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (or deployment) are common practices that aim to automate and accelerate these steps while preserving quality and traceability.

Deployment strategies influence risk and downtime. Blue-green deployment replaces the entire production stack at once with a parallel environment; canary deployment releases changes to a small subset of users before broader rollout; rolling deployment updates instances incrementally; feature flags enable controlled activation of new functionality within the same code base.

Key practices include automation of builds and deployments, infrastructure as code to manage environments, containerization and orchestration when appropriate, monitoring and observability to detect issues, and explicit rollback plans and data migrations. Security, compliance, and audit trails should be integrated into the process. Metrics such as lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) guide improvement.