Lesson 3: Adding a release environment to the release

In this lesson, you will add a release environment to the Demo Release DEV phase.

A release environment represents a deployment target. When you run a deployment, you designate a phase and one of the release environments associated with the phase. In order to run a deployment, at least one release environment must be added to the phase.

When you add a release environment to a phase, you reserve it for a specific period. If other releases or phases reserve the environment during the same period, messages alert you to possible conflicts. You can run deployments for release environments with potential conflicts after first ensuring that no actual conflicts exist. This situation might happen, for example, if you reserve an environment for several phases for testing.

Release environments also assign application environments to a phase. Although applications are not covered in this tutorial, release environments play a central role in application management.

  1. From the IBM® UrbanCode™ Release dashboard, click Releases and Deployments, and then click the name of the release you created in Lesson 1, Demo Release.
    The Release Detail page is displayed.
  2. From the Release Detail page for the Demo Release, click the New Environment Reservation icon for the DEV phase, as shown in the following figure:

    The New Environment Reservation tool
    The New Environment Reservation window is displayed, as shown in the following figure:The New Environment Reservation dialog

    The reservation window displays several default release environments: DEV-1, CERT-1, QA-1, PT-1, and PROD-1. Additional release environments can be created. However, in this tutorial we will use the default release environments. Several release environments can be added to a phase and a release environment can be added to more than one release.

  3. In the Start Date fieldist, select today's date.
    You can select the first day that you want to reserve.
  4. In the End Date list, select a date that is a day after the Start Date.
    The End Date must be the same or later than the Start Date. The two dates define the reservation period.
    Note: You can run deployments for the release environment outside of the reserved period. However, you risk unexpected conflicts when you do that. It's better to modify the reservation period, which informs other users that you intend to use the environment.
  5. In the Environment column, select DEV-1.
    You can reserve more than one release environment for a phase. If anyone else reserves the DEV-1 environment during your reservation period, they receive an alert, and the potential conflict is listed in the Notes column.
  6. Click Save.
    The DEV-1 environment is listed in the Environments Reservations column. In a typical release, you add release environments to all phases in the release. That way, you can run deployments for all lifecycle phases.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you added a release environment to the Dev phase of the Demo Release.

You can now schedule deployments for the Demo Release DEV phase by using the DEV-1 release environment. Because you didn't reserve environments for the other phases, you cannot schedule deployments for them.

The Release Detail page for the reserved release environment is shown in the following figure:
The Demo Release with the DEV-1 release environment reserved

Before you can schedule a deployment for the DEV phase, you need to add tasks to a deployment plan. We'll add tasks to the Default Plan in the next lesson.