About Runbooks and Deployment Tasks

Runbooks are templates for a collection of ordered deployment tasks. These tasks can be manual steps in the process or automated tasks that are executed in Release Automation.

Deployment tasks from approved runbooks can be copied to turnovers. Tasks can be executed sequentially or in parallel.

You can create runbooks that are available for any turnover or associate runbooks to specific environments or applications. For example, you may create a runbook dedicated to a specific production environment. Tasks from this runbook can only be copied to turnovers for the production environment.

Runbooks can be created directly from the Runbooks application or from turnovers.

Participants:

Release engineers
Release manager

Runbooks follow a process organized into these phases:

Creation
Release engineers typically create a runbook and add deployment tasks. Tasks can be also copied from other runbooks or turnovers.

Once tasks are added, the runbook is sent to a release manager for review.

For details on task creation, refer to the The Task Collection Widget.
Active
Once a runbook is accepted, tasks can no longer be added or modified.

The runbook's tasks can be copied to turnovers, however, and reordered and modified as needed. New deployment tasks can also be added to turnovers.

Note: To modify an accepted runbook, return it to the construction state.
Inactive
Inactive runbooks are no longer available to turnovers.

Deployment Tasks

When a turnover is deployed, deployment tasks are created in the order specified in the sequence. As a deployment task is completed, the next task in the sequence is created and completed. This process occurs until all deployment tasks are complete.

Manual deployment tasks are added to Release Manager project specified for the task in the runbook and assigned to an owner; automated tasks are created and completed in Release Automation.

Note: Once manual deployment tasks have been created, they can be used as template tasks for runbooks.

Once all deployment tasks are successfully completed, the turnover is automatically sent to the Deployed stage. If any tasks fail, the deployment fails.

For details on deployments, refer to About Turnovers.