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Environment-based release patterns: This is where we have two or more environments that we deploy into, but only one environment is receiving live customer traffic (e.g., by configuring our load balancers). New code is deployed into a non-live environment, and the release is performed moving traffic to this environment. These are extremely powerful patterns, because they typically require little or no change to our applications. These patterns include blue-green deployments, canary releases, and cluster immune systems, all of which will be discussed shortly.

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.