# Deployment Pipeline Process Deployment is the mechanism by which integration workflows are moved through the defined lifecycle stages in Frends. It provides a controlled and repeatable way to deploy changes from development to production, ensuring that every transition is reliable and safe. ## Lifecycle Management Frends is designed to manage the entire lifecycle of an integration natively, providing a seamless experience from the first design to the final production execution. This centralized approach ensures that moving a Process from a development build to a production-ready state is a streamlined and consistent experience. By managing the deployment process directly within the platform, Frends maintains a tight link between the visual design of the integration and its operational state. This offers users high visibility and control over their workflows without the need for additional management layers. ### Deployment Targets In Frends, the deployment of a Process is always targeted at specific Agent Groups. While an Environment provides the logical context, such as identifying the stage as Development or Production, the Agent Group represents the actual physical or virtual capacity where the Process will be hosted. This distinction allows for granular control over where integration logic executes, which is particularly valuable in hybrid or multi-cloud scenarios. Agent Groups can be located in different parts of your infrastructure, such as an on-premise server, a publicly accessible cloud, or even in geographically separate regions.

Selecting the target Environment and Agent Group for Process deployment.

### Deploying the Processes The platform handles the technical complexities of moving an integration between different Environments by automatically packaging the necessary dependencies and metadata. During this move, Frends uses Environment Variables to ensure that a single Process definition can operate correctly regardless of its location. The deployment interface automatically associates the Process with the variables defined for the target Environment, allowing it to use the correct database connections or API keys without any manual changes to the underlying logic. Users also have direct control over the initial state of the Process Triggers during the move. You can choose to activate Triggers immediately upon deployment, such as schedules or API endpoints, or keep the Process in a deactivated state for final verification. This flexibility ensures that the transition of logic and its associated settings is handled as a single, coordinated action, allowing developers to focus on the business value of the integration rather than the mechanics of the transfer. If the Process was already active before deployment, deploying a new version will also not deactivate it. ### Validation and Safety To ensure the stability of the Process in the targeted Agent Group and Environment, Frends performs automated validation checks before a deployment is completed. The platform verifies that all prerequisites are met, such as ensuring that any referenced Subprocesses have already been deployed to the target Agent Group and that every used Environment Variable has a valid value. This proactive approach prevents the deployment of incomplete or broken workflows. It ensures that the integration is ready for execution as soon as the deployment steps are finished, reducing the risk of runtime failures. Frends also provides built-in safety features to ensure that moving changes is always a low-risk task. A critical component of this is the ability to perform a rapid rollback. If a newly deployed version does not behave as expected on the Agent Group, you can easily switch back to a previous, known-good version. [Read more about Frends version control features here](/management-and-operations/integration-lifecycle/version-control.md). ### No Downtime During Deployment Deploying a new version of existing and running Process will not cause a downtime in Process executions. Any ongoing executions will continue as they are, using the version of the Process they were started in. The old version of the Process will continue to be active during the deployment until the new version is ready, ensuring any incoming request or other Trigger condition will not be missed. Once the deployment is complete, the new version of the Process will take over handling the new executions, while earlier executions will finish with the earlier version. ## Built-in Benefits In traditional software development, moving code between environments often requires a fragmented ecosystem of external CI/CD tools to build, test, and ship applications. Frends simplifies this by providing these capabilities as part of the core platform, removing the need for maintaining complex scripts and pipelines that are often disconnected from the actual integration logic. This native approach significantly reduces the complexity often associated with managing the integration lifecycle. It allows teams to focus on the business value of their integrations rather than the maintenance of the delivery pipeline. By offering a unified platform where all necessary deployment features are included, Frends eliminates the "tooling tax" of third-party management systems. The platform provides a consistent and visual way to manage these transitions, ensuring that the state of the running Process always matches what is shown in the platform history. This tight integration provides simplicity and visibility that is difficult to achieve with disparate external tools. For organizations that need to align with established corporate standards or higher levels of automation, the Frends Platform API allows you to connect these native deployment features to external systems. This makes it possible to trigger and manage Frends deployments as part of a wider corporate CI/CD pipeline using third-party orchestration tools. This approach ensures you can follow enterprise-wide workflows while still relying on Frends' built-in validation and safety checks. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. 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