Deployment

Deployment is the process of making a system or application available for use. In information technology, deployment refers to moving software from development or staging environments into production where it can be accessed by end users. In military and logistics contexts, deployment denotes the relocation of personnel, equipment, or resources to a location for a mission.

Software deployment typically includes planning, building, testing, packaging, distribution, installation, activation, and ongoing monitoring. It occurs across environments such as development, testing, staging, and production, with staging intended to mirror production to validate readiness. Artifacts such as executables, libraries, or container images are versioned and stored in a repository to support repeatable releases.

Deployment strategies influence risk and speed. Rolling deployments update instances gradually; blue-green deployments switch user traffic between two production environments to enable quick rollback. Canary releases progressively expose new versions to a small subset of users. Feature flags can enable or disable functionality without redeploying. Automation through CI/CD pipelines and configuration management reduces manual errors and accelerates delivery.

Deployment models include on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid approaches. Containerization and orchestration platforms facilitate consistent environments and scalable deployment, while infrastructure as code allows reproducible provisioning of resources.

Governance aspects include change management, release planning, and maintaining release notes. Rollback and recovery procedures are important to mitigate failures, and monitoring and observability are essential for validating performance. Common metrics include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.

Related topics include release management, continuous delivery, DevOps, and version control.