Overview
The release pipeline (often associated with Continuous Delivery/Deployment) takes the artifacts produced by the build pipeline and moves them through staging, UAT, and finally production.
Key Activities
- Environment Provisioning: Setting up the necessary infrastructure (often via IaC).
- Deployment: Installing the artifact in the target environment.
- Integration Testing: Verifying that the service works with its dependencies.
- Smoke Testing: Performing basic health checks after deployment.
- Approval Gates: Managing manual or automated sign-offs.
Benefits
- Reliability: Automates the complex process of multi-environment deployments.
- Auditability: Tracks exactly what version was deployed to which environment and by whom.