Release Orchestration

Promotions that prove themselves

Environment?A logical deployment target (e.g. dev, staging, prod) that tracks its own release history, promotion rules, and policy gates-aware workflows, policy gates, and digest-first identity. Every release decision exports a cryptographically signed Decision Capsule?A signed, exportable evidence bundle that seals every input and output of a release decision for offline audit and deterministic replay.

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The problem with typical CD tools

Most deployment tools tell you what was deployed. They can't tell you why it was safe to deploy.

Typical CD tools

✗ Tag-based releases — mutable, untraceable
✗ Approvals disconnected from artifacts
✗ No evidence of security posture at deploy time
✗ Rollback is "redeploy and hope"

Stella Ops orchestration

✓ Digest-first?Release identity based on immutable content hashes (SHA-256 digests) rather than mutable tags — ensuring byte-identical deployments identity — immutable, auditable
✓ Approvals bound to exact artifact hash
✓ Security verdicts recorded in Decision Capsules
✓ Rollback to known-good state with evidence

Core orchestration capabilities

release identity

Releases are identified by content-addressed SHA-256 digests, not mutable tags. Same digest = same artifact = same evidence.

→ Tag → digest resolution at promotion time
→ Evidence reused when same digest promotes
→ Immutable accountability chain

-aware promotions

Model your pipeline as environments with promotion rules. Dev → Stage → Prod with evidence gates at each step.

→ Promotion rules and approval requirements per environment
→ Freeze windows with calendar-based blocking
→ Environment?A logical deployment target (e.g. dev, staging, prod) that tracks its own release history, promotion rules, and policy gates-specific policy profiles
→ Real-time deployment UI with per-step logs

Policy gates at every step

Promotions require passing gates. Security verdicts, approval signatures, and freeze windows are all evaluated.

→ Security gate — scan verdict must pass threshold
→ Approval gate — required signatures collected
→ Custom gates via OPA?Open Policy Agent — an open-source policy engine that enables fine-grained, context-aware policy enforcement across the stack/Rego policies

Evidence-linked rollback

Roll back to a previous digest with full evidence trail. Know exactly what you're returning to.

→ Rollback targets specific digest, not "previous version"
→ Evidence from original promotion preserved
→ Rollback itself generates new Decision Capsule?A signed, exportable evidence bundle that seals every input and output of a release decision for offline audit and deterministic replay

Incremental deployment strategies

Progressive rollouts with evidence at every step. Canary, rolling, and blue-green execution, each step pinned to a digest.

→ Canary, rolling, and blue-green execution — traffic splitting itself is handled by your load balancer, proxy, or service mesh
→ Feature-flag releases (nginx reload, microservice plugins)
→ Incremental rollout that stops on a failed step, with rollback to the last approved digest

See it in action

Every promotion command outputs structured evidence.

Terminal

$ stella release promote api-gateway --to staging --reason "gate passed"

Workflow engine capabilities

DAG execution

Step graphs with parallel and sequential execution.

Step registry

Built-in steps plus custom automation.

Workflow templates

Reusable workflows across projects.

Script steps

Bash and.NET scripting for custom logic.

Freeze windows

Calendar-based deployment blocking.

Audit export

Compliance-ready evidence bundles.

What makes it different

Decision Capsules

Every promotion sealed in an exportable, replayable evidence bundle.

Deterministic replay

Re-run any promotion decision 6 months later with identical results.

Evidence-linked

Approvals, verdicts, and artifacts bound by cryptographic hashes.

Deployment patterns

A/B deployment

Run two release versions side by side, each pinned to its own digest. Your load balancer or proxy decides how traffic divides; Stella records which digest was promoted and on what evidence.

Canary release

Roll out to a small percentage of targets first. Promote wider only after evidence gates pass.

Blue/Green switch

Maintain two identical environments. Switch traffic atomically after policy evaluation.

Rollback to known-good

Revert to the last-known-good digest instantly. Evidence from both forward and rollback promotions is preserved.

Ready for evidence-grade orchestration?

Start with environment setup and your first promotion.

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Evidence Engine · Security Decisioning · All features