Release management overview
Release management in Unleash helps you standardize, automate and safeguard your feature rollouts. Instead of manually controlling each stage of a release, you can define a reusable, structured rollout process that progresses automatically while monitoring application health to prevent issues from affecting users.
Release management combines:
- Release templates: Predefined rollout sequences that you can apply to any feature flag.
- Impact metrics: Application-level metrics that track feature health in real time.
- Automated release progression and safeguards: Time-based progressions and metric-based safeguards that manage releases without manual intervention.
Release management structures your rollout process around milestones that execute sequentially. Each milestone defines what portion of users receives the feature using activation strategies. You control progression between milestones through manual triggers, time-based automation, or metric-based conditions.
For a step-by-step walkthrough, see Get started with release management.
Core concepts and relationships
The following concepts work together to enable release management:
| Concept | Description | Related concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Release template | A predefined sequence of milestones | Contains milestones |
| Milestone | A stage in a release with activation strategies | Part of release templates |
| Release plan | An instance of a release template applied to a feature flag | Created from release templates |
| Impact metric | Application-level time-series data | Used by safeguards |
| Automated release progression | Time-based milestone advancement | Configured per milestone |
| Safeguard | Metric-based condition that pauses releases | Uses impact metrics |
How release management works
Release templates and milestones
Release templates standardize your rollout approach across features. Each template contains a sequence of milestones that represent stages in your release process, such as:
- Internal testing with your team
- Beta rollout to 10% of users
- Expanded rollout to 50% of users
- Full release to all users
Each milestone contains at least one activation strategy that determines for whom the feature flag is enabled. You define the template once and apply it to multiple feature flags, ensuring consistency across your releases.
When you apply a release template to a feature flag in a specific environment, Unleash creates a release plan. The release plan contains the milestones from the template and manages the progression through each stage.
Automated progressions
Automated progressions eliminate manual milestone transitions. You configure time intervals for each milestone, and Unleash automatically advances to the next stage when the interval elapses.
For example, you might configure a release to:
- Start with internal users
- Progress to 25% of users after 12 hours
- Progress to 50% of users after another 24 hours
- Progress to 100% of users after another 48 hours
Automated progressions reduce the operational overhead of managing releases, especially for teams shipping features frequently or outside standard working hours.
Impact metrics and safeguards
Impact metrics connect application data to your release process. You define metrics in your application code using the Unleash SDK, such as error counts, request latency, or memory usage. Unleash stores and visualizes these metrics, allowing you to monitor feature health directly in the Admin UI.
Impact metrics support three types:
- Counters: Cumulative values like request counts or error counts.
- Gauges: Fluctuating values like memory usage or active connections.
- Histograms: Value distributions like request duration (with percentiles).
Safeguards use impact metrics to protect your release. You define thresholds for your metrics, and Unleash pauses the automated progression when a metric exceeds the threshold.
For example, you might configure a safeguard to pause the rollout if error counts exceed 10 in a 15-minute window.
When a safeguard triggers, the current milestone continues to run, but no further progressions occur. You can investigate the issue, deploy a fix, and manually resume the release when ready.
Why use release management
Release management provides structure and safety for feature rollouts:
- Consistency: Release templates ensure every feature follows the same rollout process.
- Automation: Time-based progressions reduce manual work and enable off-hours releases.
- Risk mitigation: Safeguards detect issues early and prevent widespread impact.
- Visibility: Impact metrics show how features affect application health in real time.
Learn more
- Release templates: Learn how to create and configure release templates.
- Impact metrics: Understand metric types and how to use them.
- Get started with release management: Follow a complete tutorial.