The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

Of course, we know that we need to be deploying more frequently to achieve our desired outcome of smooth and fast flow, not less frequently. To enable this, we need to decouple our production deployments from our feature releases. In practice, the terms deployment and release are often used interchangeably. However, they are two distinct actions that serve two very different purposes: Deployment is the installation of a specified version of software to a given environment (e.g., deploying code into an integration test environment or deploying code into production). Specifically, a deployment may or may not be associated with a release of a feature to customers. Release is when we make a feature (or set of features) available to all our customers or a segment of customers (e.g., we enable the feature to be used by 5% of our customer base). Our code and environments should be architected in such a way that the release of functionality does not require changing our application code.¶ In other words, when we conflate deployment and release, it makes it difficult to create accountability for successful outcomes—decoupling these two activities allows us to empower Development and Operations to be responsible for the success of fast and frequent deployments, while enabling product owners to be responsible for the successful business outcomes of the release (i.e., was building and launching the feature worth our time).