Comparison
Artefact promotionvsRelease
Artefact promotion
the same version moves from staging to production by changing a reference, and no build runs to make that happen.
Advancing a specific artefact version through a sequence of environments as it earns confidence. It makes the question 'what is in production' answerable and gives rollback an obvious target — the version that was there before. Where promotion is implemented as a rebuild from a branch, none of those properties hold, which is the main practical reason branch-per-environment schemes go wrong.
Full entry →Release
you flip the flag and users start getting the new behaviour, on code that has already been running in production for a week.
Exposing new behaviour to users. Separating it from deployment is the single highest-leverage change to a delivery process: deploys become routine and releases become a business decision with an instant off switch. It requires the code to be flag-guarded and both paths to be tested.
Full entry →