Deployment is the verb form of release. The release is the fixed plan; deployment is one execution of that plan against a specific environment. The same release can be deployed many times - useful for re-runs, rollbacks via re-deploy of the previous release, or re-applying to a fresh target.
What happens when you click deploy
The platform runs through a fixed sequence:
// Deployment in flight
checkout-service 2026.5.17 -> Production
02m 14s
✓ Resolve targets (3 targets matched)
✓ Resolve variables (38 values)
✓ Step 1: Database migration (00m 12s)
✓ Step 2: Deploy Checkout.Web (00m 48s)
● Step 3: Restart service (running on prd-web-02...)
○ Step 4: Health check
What the platform does, in order
- Resolve targets - which targets in the environment match each step's scope?
- Resolve variables - pre-compute the values each step will see.
- Run each step in order - fanning out across matching targets, gating on the slowest.
- Stream logs - per step, per target, live to the UI.
- Record the outcome - success or failure, with timing per step.
Re-deploying
The same release can be deployed to the same environment more than once. Common reasons: the previous run failed and you've fixed the cause, you want to re-apply a configuration drift, or you're refreshing a freshly-rebuilt target. Each deployment gets its own record - history shows N runs, not one.