Deploys

Deploys are the acts of moving software artifacts from development or staging environments into production or another runtime environment where they can be used. A deploy typically involves packaging the build, applying configuration, provisioning or adjusting infrastructure, and initiating the software to run in the target environment. In practice, deploys are a core part of software delivery and are often automated as part of a continuous delivery or continuous deployment pipeline.

Deployment and release are related but distinct. A deployment refers to updating the system’s code in an environment; a release is the decision to make that update available to users. Some teams practice continuous deployment, in which every successful change is automatically deployed to production, while others use continuous delivery, where deployments can be triggered manually after passing tests.

Common deployment strategies include rolling updates, blue-green deployments, canary releases, and feature-flag deployments. Rolling updates replace instances sequentially; blue-green uses two production environments and switches traffic; canary releases gradually expose the change to a subset of users. Modern deployments are supported by containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code practices to describe and provision environments.

Reliability and risk management for deploys rely on versioning, automated testing, health checks, monitoring, and rollback capabilities. Observability and metrics such as deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery inform process improvement and stability.