Within the CED platform, a Promotion is the process of distributing a version from a subsystem in one environment to another and proceed to activate it.
Start
A promotion flow starts with a click on the promotion button that can be found on any valid version within a subsystem:
Confirm
To confirm the Promotion you must define a destination in a side dialog. Upon clicking on Promote again the distribution and activation of that version will start:
Notice the section titled Promotion Constraints. These are project-level restrictions available for tech leads to ensure maximum agency for engineers while promoting systemic check and balances.
Our platform currently support several types of Promotion Constraints, which more in the way:
Environment constraint
Peer approval constraint (Enterprise only)
Time of the week constraint (Enterprise only)
Age of version constraint (Enterprise only)
Distribution
Once a promotion is initiated you will notice an arrow appearing next to the version:
This indicates the version was distributed to another subsystem in another environment. To know which versions came from a subsystem (versus source control) another arrow can be observed:
As with more visual elements representing versions these promotion arrows can be use to navigate between environments and subsystems.
Best Practices
Of course, the most popular promotion among our clients tends to be between development and production. The true is that Promotions were designed to enhance the agency of every member of the team, not just engineers:
A favorite example of this is an organization that using promotion constraints were able to provision a demo-only environment where the Product Manager can promote daily different development versions to support ongoing enterprise leads.
All without taking time from development and keeping disruption at zero.