Deployments

What actually happens when you type orbit deploy.

The release lifecycle

Every deploy moves through the same five stages, laptop or CI:

plan -> diff -> apply -> verify -> live

1. Plan. Orbit compares orbit.yaml plus your artifact against what is
   currently running and produces a release plan.
2. Diff. The plan is printed as a diff - services added, config changed,
   routes moved. Since 0.4 this is always shown
   (why we changed it).
3. Apply. The new release is built out alongside the old one. Nothing
   the old release serves is touched.
4. Verify. Orbit polls your health endpoint until it passes, or gives
   up and discards the new release - your users never saw it.
5. Live. Traffic switches. The old release stays on disk, addressable,
   ready for rollback.

Releases are immutable

A release is a sealed artifact plus its resolved config. Promotion between
environments moves the same release - what you tested in staging is
byte-for-byte what production runs.

Read next

• Rollbacks - undo in seconds
• Zero-downtime - how the switch works