DevOps Release Management: Stages & Best Practices

DevOps release management coordinates the planning, scheduling, and control of software builds through testing and deployment into production. It focuses on automation, collaboration, and traceability across CI/CD pipelines to ensure reliable, fast, and frequent releases. 

Release management’s primary purpose in DevOps is to coordinate efficient and reliable software deployment while maintaining quality, security, and compliance. It minimizes the risk of service disruptions, improves cross-team coordination, and ensures that each deployment supports business objectives and meets regulatory standards.

Key components of release management include planning, build management, testing coordination, deployment, monitoring, and rollback strategies. Each phase ensures that code changes are delivered safely and efficiently to users.

Different types of release management

Different types of release management often vary by methodology. 

• Traditional release management is typically found in Waterfall or enterprise IT environments. Releases are planned far in advance, with rigid phase gates such as development, QA, UAT, and production. These processes rely on change advisory boards (CABs), formal approvals, and manual deployments, making them predictable but slow and prone to bottlenecks.
• DevOps release management emphasizes automation and collaboration across teams. It integrates CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and real-time monitoring to streamline releases, improve reliability, and shorten lead times. 
• Agile release management complements iterative development. Releases are aligned with sprint cadences, using backlogs to guide priority. Techniques like feature toggles, canary releases, and MVPs support fast feedback while limiting risk. Unlike DevOps, Agile may retain some manual steps but aims for agility and responsiveness to user needs.

Notably, 86% of professionals favor a DevOps culture for accelerating software development and delivery, underscoring the growing industry emphasis on speed and efficiency.

Ok, but how can organizations manage the increasing pace and complexity of software changes? Release management is not just a technical process. It is a discipline that connects people, tools, and methods to deliver value to users and the business. 

Let’s look at its key components:

1. Planning and coordination: This initial stage includes defining clear objectives, scope, and timelines for each release. It also means aligning all stakeholders and different teams involved early to avoid late delivery.
2. Risk management: This step aims to identify potential risks in newly created software and develop mitigation strategies before rolling out to production. This is often part of the planning phase, but at other times, it is considered a continuous effort throughout the software development and delivery lifecycle.
3. Development: During development, the teams build new features, fix bugs, and make improvements based on business requirements while ensuring code quality through peer reviews, version control, and testing.
4. Testing and quality assurance: Although often considered part of the development phase, testing is a critical component of a successful release management process. Ultimately, it’s where most defects and bugs should be identified before they reach production.During this stage, the developed code is tested using various automated and manual methods to verify its functionality, security, and performance. Lastly, quality assurance processes ensure that the release meets all the intended requirements.
5. Deployment: After the new code has been tested and verified in lower-level environments, such as staging, it’s time to move changes into production in a controlled and predictable way. There are various ways to deploy software releases to production environments with minimal downtime. A few common approaches include rolling deployments, blue/green deployments, canary deployments, and feature flags.
6. Monitoring and optimization: This stage starts after a new release rolls out and involves tracking the performance and stability of the latest changes in production. To achieve this, DevOps and software engineering teams use observability and monitoring tools to detect issues early, gather data and feedback, and make continuous improvements. Monitoring and optimization close the loop in release management, helping teams learn from each release and improve future ones.
7. Documentation: It’s useful to maintain documentation of the overall release process, decisions, outcomes, challenges, and release contents for future reference.

Release management is not easy. Modern systems are complex and distributed, and applications often rely on microservices, APIs, and third-party integrations. Teams often work across different time zones, multiple environments, and platforms. How do you keep releases reliable when your infrastructure and software keep changing at a rapid rate?

Another concern is tool and process fragmentation. Different teams within an organization use various release approaches, configuration standards, and other tools for different environments. This makes coordination harder and increases the chances of human errors.

Multicloud setups add even more complexity. Each cloud provider has its own tools, processes, deployment models, access controls, and limitations. Performing releases with consistency across these platforms is not trivial.

Speed is another challenge. Businesses want to deliver features fast, and developers need quick feedback. But moving too quickly can lead to mistakes, vulnerabilities, and outages. 

How do you balance the need for speed with the need for control and reliability? Spacelift’s 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report addresses this speed vs. control paradox.

Communication and alignment can also be struggles. Releases often require input from developers, testers, security teams, and operations. Without a clear and well-tested process, delays and misunderstandings are common. 

Lastly, visibility is critical for success. Teams need insight into what has been released, what is pending, and what has failed. Without robust observability in place, tracking issues or rolling back becomes harder.

How can you make your release management process more reliable and efficient? Start with clear, practical steps. Successful organizations have found ways to optimize their release management processes, achieving both speed and control by adopting best practices.

• Define clear criteria for success – Set measurable acceptance metrics for every release. These metrics could include performance benchmarks, failure rate percentages, accepted downtime, or user acceptance tests. Clear criteria help teams know when a release is ready. They also make it easier to track progress and spot problems early.
• Leverage automation – Automate repetitive tasks such as testing, building, and deployment. This reduces manual errors and speeds up the release cycle. Automation also enables frequent integration and delivery, making it easier to release updates often. Review your workflows; are there steps that still rely on manual work? What tools could help automate these steps?
• Develop rollback strategies – No release is risk-free, and even robust systems sometimes fail. Prepare for failures by having a rollback plan in place. A well-prepared rollback plan means you can quickly revert to a previous version if something goes wrong. Test your rollback process regularly to make sure it works when you need it. Set accepted thresholds for the time it takes to recover after a failed release.
• Maintain consistent pre-production environments – Pre-production environments, such as your staging and testing environments, should closely match production. Having consistency across your different environments while promoting code from lower-level to production environments helps you catch issues before they reach users. Use the same configurations, data, and versions where possible.
• Implement continuous observability – Use a robust observability strategy to monitor your systems, applications, and infrastructure holistically and in real time.  Use your observability tools to track performance, errors, and user behavior. Set up alerts for critical issues. Quick detection is tightly correlated to faster resolution and less downtime. Questions to ask within your teams include: How fast can your team respond to incidents? Are you capturing the right data?
• Pick the right tools – Select tools that fit your release management needs. Tools like Spacelift can automate workflows, manage infrastructure as code, and provide visibility across environments. The right tools can reduce friction and improve collaboration. Strong release management is not about doing more work. It’s about doing the right work with the right tools and processes.

Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools, including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.

Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Request a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.

In this blog, we explored how release management connects development and operations, serving as a vital bridge in the software delivery process. It brings structure to the software development lifecycle by defining how software release transitions from code to production. Clear acceptance criteria, automation, rollback strategies, consistent environments, monitoring, and the right tools all contribute to a more reliable release pipeline.

Each element of release management helps reduce risk and improve delivery speed. Even small improvements can enhance the software release process, leading to better software quality and a smoother user experience.