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

by Gene Kim

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.