Releasing software#

A release is a container for deployment plans, events, and properties.

A release is a repeatable plan that is used to drive deployments. You can schedule a release at any point in your development-operations lifecycle. Your releases can represent all kinds of events, from major events in the life of your company to comparatively minor events, like recurring maintenance.

Typically, a release contains deployment plans and events that are related in some business-meaningful way. For example, the deployment plans might represent the phases in a software development lifecycle, such as development, QA, and production. An event might represent a blackout that affects the release.

If a deployment plan in a release has user-defined properties, the tasks in the release's other deployment plans can reference them. In other words, properties have release scope.

If you add events to a release, you can use the calendar to filter the Releases page to display releases and deployment plans.

You can use pipelines to manage releases. Every application added to a pipeline has release and deployment plan templates generated for it. As jobs and apps are added to a pipeline, tasks are inserted in the default deployment plan. You can run deployments directly from the Pipeline page or from the Deployment plan detail page.