Should deployment be a synonym for content-delivery?

Question

In looking at the Tag Synonyms (https://tridion.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms) suggested by Bart, one of the suggestions that really stood out to me as maybe not being a good idea is the one for making deployment a synonym for content-delivery.

To me it looks like two of the questions (Developing Page/Component Template Designs through Visual Studio and How can Content Porter be automated to move commonly changed items between environments?) are actually about deploying (or moving) items to/between Tridion instances and not really about content-delivery in any way.

It looks like another two questions (Aspx page rendering SmartTarget <tcdl> tags and Publishing issue for a single page) are really about publishing and the deployer and not specifically about content-delivery.

It looks like really the only question that might be considered to be about content-delivery is Implementing Multiple deployers/Broker databases vs. replication even though it really spans publishing, the deployer and content-delivery.

So, the questions I have are:

• Does this Synonym really make sense?

• Is a better approach in this case to ensure there is a tag wiki for deployment explaining when to use that tag along with additional instructions in the tag wiki’s for content-delivery and publishing?

• Although most of us probably consider the deployer services/storage as part of ‘publishing’ would it reduce some confusion if we had a deployer tag in addition to the publishing tag?

Answer 1

I agree (as the asker as one of the questions tagged as such) that deployment is not necessarily talking about the deployer.

Moving items between environments is a complex issue that definitely should be represented by a tag here. Perhaps releases or release-process would be better to avoid confusion with the Content Delivery deployer?

Answer 2

Updated to match actual question--oops.

For moving changes between Dev Test Acceptance or Production (DTAP) environments, maybe we could use something about code or software builds.

• code-deployment
• software-release
• software-builds
• development-practices?

We can also consider deleting deployment as a tag and see if deployer or specific customizations would be better tags?

Nuno and Bart actually suggest deployment is a bit generic in our Meta discussion on tags. Removing that tag could be an option to not confuse it with deployer (like I did in my first answer), which is a part of content-delivery and includes Custom Protocol, Resolver, Renderer, Sender, Module and/or Processor, and Storage.

SDL Live Content has another nice overview that points these out. These specific tags could help avoid confusion with the generic idea of "deployment" of content or code changes.

Answer 3

It seems the best answer here is to retag the two questions which are about the software release process with an appropriate tag and then retag the rest of the questions currently marked with deployment as content-delivery and when/if I have enough rep to vote on Bart’s synonym suggestion to do so.

We also should probably put a ‘when to use this tag’ section in content-delivery’s tag wiki.

The question then becomes, what is the right tag for the questions about the software release process?

I worry the suggested tags releases software-release and software-builds all have a potential issue that someone think questions with those tags are talking about SDL releases (but I might just be overthinking this.)

This leaves the suggestions from Rob and Alvin of release-process, code-deployment or development-practices I tend to lean towards the latter as it is a little broader in scope and could be used to cover other areas of the SDLC.

EDIT: I retagged the two questions about the release process with release-process, approved and merged the suggested synonym mapping deployment to content-delivery

Answer 4

Deployment and Content Delivery are definitely not synonyms. Content Delivery generally means "delivering content to the web visitor". Deployment in Tridion terms usually means content deployment, which is what the Deployer does. Some people on the team will also use it to mean web application deployment. Whatever - there's a bunch of assets that need to be deployed to a delivery server to allow the visitor to experience the content.

Other than that specific sense of Content Delivery, we also use the term to refer to the entire Content Delivery environment or environments, and everything that happens there. So anything that isn't Content Management is Content Delivery.

(In a Tridion context, Transport almost always means "Transport of deployment assets from the Content Management system to the Content Delivery system". In this sense, it can either be part of CM, or CD, both or none.)