# Software Deployment in 2025: Checklist, Strategies & Tips ## What Is Software Deployment (Application Deployment)? Software or application deployment is the process required to make new or updated software available to its users. Most organizations today automate at least some of the steps involved in deploying new applications. Many organizations are adopting a deployment model known as [continuous delivery](https://codefresh.io/learn/continuous-delivery/), in which software releases are constantly in a deployable state and can be deployed to production fully automatically at the click of a button. Software deployment typically includes activities such as provisioning environments, installing, and testing software. Deployment should also include ongoing monitoring of the health and performance of newly deployed environments, and the ability to roll back a deployment if something goes wrong. Software deployment and software release may seem synonymous, but they serve two different functions. Software release is an iterative process of developing an application, while software deployment is the process of rolling out an application. A new release can include additional functionality, bug fixes, or security patches. Software deployment involves pushing software to an IT environment or delivering it to end-users. Codefresh is a Kubernetes-native software deployment solution designed to simplify the continuous integration and delivery of applications. ## Software Deployment Checklist While each software deployment model operates differently, there are several phases each deployment process should follow. This is a quick checklist for effective deployments: ### Preparation Here are important steps to implement during the planning phase: - **Notify all stakeholders**—it is critical to inform all users about the upcoming deployment and teach users how to use the new features rolled out. - **Identify collaborators**—the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is a collaborative process that can involve disparate teams. You should identify and inform all collaborators to minimize friction between development, operations, and security teams. - **List third-party tools**—identifying all tools and requirements involved in the deployment process can help you ensure all collaborators know how to use them effectively and minimize any issues related to these tools. - **Set up a testing environment**—always test your software before rolling out the new product to end users. - **Design a clear deployment process**—communicate with the team to ensure the deployment process is clear to all involved and everyone is on the same page. - **Create a rollback plan**—use this plan if critical problems arise during the deployment. Progressive delivery strategies make it possible to roll back deployments seamlessly and automatically ( [learn more below](https://codefresh.io/learn/software-deployment/#what-is-progressive-delivery)). - **Identify performance metrics**—common metrics include memory and CPU usage and query response times. You can use these basic metrics and custom KPIs to measure the effectiveness of a deployment. In progressive delivery, you can even use these metrics to automatically determine whether the deployment succeeded or failed. ### Testing The testing phase validates your software before deployment. Here are important aspects to cover during this phase: - **Write unit tests**—the goal is to test a small portion of the software to verify its behavior independently from the other portions. A unit test passes when the result is consistent with requirements and fails if it gives an inconsistent result. - **Integrate tests with the CI process**—integrate your unit tests into a shared repository to automatically build and verify each portion. Doing this before deployment enables you to fix and remove bugs more easily than fixing in production. - **Deploy tests in a staging environment**—create an exact reproduction of the targeted production environment and use it to test updates, code, and other aspects to ensure the software works as intended before deployment. - **Run end-to-end tests to look for regression**—the goal is to test an application’s workflow from start to end, going through all the operations it can perform to check how it works with other components like network connectivity and hardware. - **Acceptance testing**—this final step of the testing process verifies the software with stakeholders or real users. Their feedback helps determine whether the software is ready for production or not. In a continuous delivery process, this can be handled by the concept of acceptance gates, in which an automated deployment waits for manual approval and then proceeds. - **Use smoke tests**—create a dedicated test suite for running it in production AFTER the deployment to verify that the software that was just released doesn’t have any regressions. ### Deployment and Release Process This final phase covers important aspects of implementing the deployment and involves: - **Deploy to production**—push the update to the production environment where users interact with the software. - **Monitor product performance**—use your predetermined KPIs to monitor the product’s performance, checking for aspects like HTTP errors and database performance. - **Monitor environment health**—use monitoring tools to identify potential issues related to the software environment, like the operating system, database system, and compiler. - **Perform automated rollbacks**—use smoke tests and metrics to decide if the release was successful or not and automatically go to the previous release if there are issues. - **Track logs**—you can use logs to gain visibility into how the software runs on infrastructure components, investigate errors, and identify security threats. - **Document release versioning and notes**—keeping copies of new versions created when you make changes to the product helps maintain consistency. ## 5 Tips for Software Deployment Success The following best practices can help you deploy software more effectively. ### Keep Separate Clusters for Production and Non-Production Having one large cluster for everything creates issues for resource consumption and security. It is essential to have at least two clusters, one for production and one for non-production resources. Keeping clusters separate helps prevent communication between the pods in each cluster. This best practice helps prevent scenarios where the developer deploys a test feature in a namespace on the cluster housing production. If the developer runs integration tests on the feature, they may impact the back end production workloads. Using different namespaces is not sufficient for separating environments. ### Apply Resource Limits By default, there are no resource limits when deploying an application to Kubernetes. Without specified limits, applications can consume the entire cluster, disrupting performance in a production cluster. Every application should have resource limits—developers might not handle this themselves, but they should know what CPU and memory limits to set. ### Collect Deployment Metrics Kubernetes clusters have distributed services supporting dynamic applications, so it is important to have appropriate metrics to enable the applications to adapt to traffic. Metrics are important for obtaining crucial information quickly without kubectl, understanding traffic patterns, and informing resource limits. ### Implement a Secrets Strategy When using dynamic services to handle configuration changes, they (or similar services) should also handle the related secrets. They pass secrets to containers during runtime. It is important to use a unified strategy to handle secrets, ensuring that different types of secrets (i.e., runtime vs build secrets) are not confused and maintaining smooth testing and development. ### Automate Database Updates Database management is as important as handling an application. It is best to automate databases to application code—this involves creating automatic update pipelines for new changesets. A dynamic temporary environment allows teams to review changesets and code safely.