[pondidum]

From the link further up the replies:

> Deploy is the act of moving software into an environment and running it.

> Release is the process of making a feature visible to a user or subset of users.

In our case, we deploy often (10s of times per day), and make use of feature flags for releasing. Keeping an eye on data in Honeycomb before and after a deployment and before and after a flag is changed is part of the engineers job.

If something doesn't look like it's working as intended, ideally it is disabled with a flag, rather than needing to figure out how a rollback can be done (often it can't), or rushing a fix and roll forward.

[FridgeSeal]

This is a pretty small distinction in my experience, and I think you'd find that most people would go with "if it goes into prod, it counts as a release".

Regardless of how confident you are on your feature-flagging functionality, everyone's going to be unimpressed if suddenly your "minor" deploy has caused a bunch of things to go haywire at 4:30pm on a Friday and now people have to stay back and fix things.