Deploymentdepends

Deploymentdepends is a term used in deployment orchestration to describe the explicit declaration of dependencies between deployment units, services, or tasks. It functions as a declarative mechanism that allows operators to specify that one deployment should only proceed after one or more prerequisites have completed successfully. The concept is aimed at ensuring correct ordering, reducing race conditions, and increasing reliability in multi-service or multi-environment releases.

In configuration languages that support deploymentdepends, users list dependencies under a deployment or stage, often with optional conditionals such as health checks or version constraints. For example, a deployment configuration might specify that the frontend deployment depends on the backend service and the database being ready, or that a canary release only proceeds if the previous stage is healthy. Deploymentdepends can be expressed as a graph of nodes where edges indicate prerequisite relationships, enabling the orchestrator to plan execution accordingly.

Behaviorally, deploymentdepends prompts the deployment system to resolve the dependency graph, detect cycles, and execute tasks in a safe order, potentially allowing independent deployments to run in parallel. It typically integrates with timeouts, retries, and rollback policies to handle failures gracefully and to maintain system stability during releases.

Relation to other concepts includes similarities to depends_on or needs directives in other tooling, such as Docker Compose, Kubernetes operators, or CI/CD pipeline definitions. See also: dependency management, orchestration, pipeline as code.