An environment is a subset of IT infrastructure used for a particular purpose. Deployment is generally considered the final stage of the software development lifecycle SDLC :. The activities involved in deployment management include:. Traditionally, deployments were carried out using what is termed a big-bang approach where all features are released in one go. But currently, due to technology and risk management, rolling or phased deployments are preferred through gradual release across the environment over a period of time.
One common technique used in deployment is the blue-green approach. Traffic is then switched from blue to green, and the performance of the new service or features is then monitored. In case of a major hitch, traffic is switched back to blue like a rollback , allowing for fixing and remedies without affecting customers significantly. Deployment had been a challenging part of software development through the years, but lately has been made easier thanks to advances in practices such as DevOps.
Tools are fast becoming mainstream solutions in this area, such as:. However, many organizations still use manual change approvals to trigger deployment to production environments, typically for two main reasons:. A collection of one or more new or changed services or service components deployed into the live environment as a result of one or more changes. In other words, a release makes services and features available to users.
More often than not, release management is more of a business responsibility than a technical responsibility. This is because the decisions on scheduling releases can be tied to business strategy from a revenue or portfolio management perspective.
A company can decide to release features based on an agreed marketing plan or stagger the releases to prevent cannibalizing existing products or to counter competitor activity. The key distinction between these deployment and release is the business rationale. Some companies will release at the same time as deployment to production is taking place.
Others will choose to wait, thereby having the new features in production but not availed to users until the business decides. By automating every phase of your software delivery lifecycle—build, test, and run—you can deliver the efficiency, agility, and quality your business needs now.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion. See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing blogs bmc. Joseph is a global best practice trainer and consultant with over 14 years corporate experience.
It takes care of all the technical checks and balances, without any of the risk incurred by serving actual production traffic. You can conclude that deploying a piece of software is a mundane and risk-free activity. A release comes after a deployment and includes all the activities that are needed to move part of, or all, production traffic to the new version.
All the risks and things that could go wrong - downtime, lost revenue, angry managers and customers - are related to the release, and not deploy, to production. You can conclude that releasing a piece of software is an exciting and pretty risky activity.
Traffic can be incrementally directed at the new version, slowly increasing the load, while monitoring for any performance issues, transactional errors or code bugs. Starting out with a small segment of users either a percentage based, or more complex selection of users; for instance, all logged-out users , the release is verified in production, without any of the impact of releasing it to all users immediately.
This safeguards the quality of your code and minimizes the business impact should a release fail. The smaller your releases, the better, faster and more flexible each release is.
Next, it is deployed to a staging environment before going live. Organizations with complex infrastructure and interdependencies as well as multiple deployments happening in parallel typically introduce more steps in their deployment process. It is not uncommon to have multiple testing environments for integration testing and user acceptance testing. More organizations are embracing autom ation and DevOps practices to im prove deployments.
Operations teams are increasingly choosing to automate IT changes using reusable code, much like developers do when versioning and delivering software changes. This evolution has led to infrastructure as code IaC and architecture as code AaC — where all parts of a system are designed, tested, and deployed as code.
As part of the everything-as-code model, modern approaches to deployment include:. Continuous integration: New code is automatically tested for quality before getting integrated into a shared development repository. Continuous delivery: More automated tests are applied before code is released to production. Continuous deployment: Usually refers to the automation of the delivery process, so that code is released to production automatically after passing the applicable tests.
Of course, deployments are just one segment in a much larger release management process. IT teams need to define processes for the entire release cycle. The diagram below shows a simplified release cycle, from planning to successful deployment. Different contexts dictate different practices. For example, most teams will have more robust processes in place for brand new features, whereas a bug fix may be automatically deployed via a pull request.
The processes and methods that govern the release process are tightly coupled with an organization's change management processes. The full release is planned — its scope, requirements, and timelines. You may choose to create a release checklist or a roadmap that visualizes key milestones and dependencies. One of the common methods for release planning is the systems development life cycle SDLC. In this phase, engineers design and develop the new solution, and the code is aggregated into a build.
The build is deployed to testing environments. Depending on the type of changes, tests may be simple or more in-depth. These tests validate the change or code readiness. At this stage, the last preparations for the release are made with the quality assurance QA team managing final checks. The release management steps may sound straightforward. But the details are anything but simple. And it is not just about managing the technical aspects of a release either.
The entire process impacts the IT team's quality of life at work. A defined release management process brings greater stability and predictability — allowing the team to release updates, changes, and new features on schedule.
And successful deployments help the business deliver new customer experiences that delight. IT IT release management. Introduction to release management and deployments The stakes are always high. Deployment vs. Here is a simple breakdown of the most common terms: Deployment The roll-out of new features, upgrades, or changes from one deployment environment to another. Release Features or code that deliver a new customer experience. Delivery The entire cycle of work that is done from planning to production.
0コメント