Terminology

This glossary provides an overview of key Lifecycle concepts and terminology. Let’s see how they fit into the environment setup and deployment process.

Repository

A repository refers to a GitHub repository. Each environment that is built must have a default repository and an associated pull request.

Service

A service is a deployable artifact. It can be a Docker container, CI pipeline, RDS database, or Helm chart. A single repository can contain multiple services.

Example:
frontend-service and frontend-cache are two services required for the frontend application to function correctly.

Environment

An environment is a stack of services built and connected together.

• defaultServices are built and deployed in an environment by default.
• optionalServices can be built and deployed only when needed; otherwise, they fallback to the default static environment.

Static Environment

A static environment is a long-lived environment based on a pull request. It tracks branches from configured services and updates automatically when new changes are merged.

Build

A build is the actual instance of the process to build and deploy services within an environment.

• Each build is uniquely identified by Lifecycle using a UUID (e.g., arm-model-060825 or dev-0).
• A build contains one deploy per service in the configuration.

Deploy

A deploy manages the build and deployment execution of a service within an environment.

Example:
In a frontend environment, frontend-service and frontend-cache are two deploys created for the environment, each mapped to a unique build UUID.

Webhook

Lifecycle can invoke third-party services when a build state changes. Currently, only Codefresh triggers are supported.

Example

• When the build status is deployed, trigger end-to-end tests.
• When the build status is error, trigger infrastructure cleanup.