20.3 Approval-Gated Production Release

Orbnetes deployment and release orchestration documentation for operators and platform teams.

Objective

Enforce explicit human approval before production deployment starts.

Prerequisites

  • approver users exist with required permissions,
  • project notification policy includes approval-required events,
  • release approval process ownership is defined.

Steps

  1. Create release as usual (title, blueprint, source/tag/file, inputs).
  2. Add approvers in Approvers panel.
  3. Launch release.
  4. Confirm release status = pending_approval.
  5. Approvers review release details and optionally comment.
  6. Approvers click approve.
  7. After required approvals, release transitions to execution (queued/running).
  8. Monitor pipeline and final status.

Success Criteria

  • deployment does not start before approvals,
  • approval actions are recorded with actor and timestamp,
  • release executes only after gate is satisfied.

Common Pitfalls

  • selecting users without effective approve scope,
  • unclear approver ownership causing long pending state,
  • notification routing missing key approvers.