Cloud Deploy

Google Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery service that automates the deployment of applications to GCP targets such as GKE, Cloud Run, and Anthos. It provides a structured delivery pipeline with promotion between environments, approval gates, rollback capabilities, and deployment verification — all managed through a declarative configuration.

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What Is Cloud Deploy?

Cloud Deploy is the CD (Continuous Delivery) counterpart to Cloud Build's CI (Continuous Integration). While Cloud Build handles building and testing, Cloud Deploy manages the progression of artefacts through deployment environments.

Key Characteristics

Characteristic	Description
Managed delivery	Google handles the deployment infrastructure
Progressive delivery	Promote releases through environments (dev → staging → production)
Approval gates	Require manual approval before production deployments
Rollback	One-click rollback to any previous release
Render and deploy	Separates manifest rendering from deployment execution
Audit trail	Full history of every release, promotion, and rollback
Canary deployments	Gradual rollout with automatic traffic shifting

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Core Concepts

Delivery Pipeline

A delivery pipeline defines the sequence of targets (environments) that a release must progress through:

# clouddeploy.yaml
apiVersion: deploy.cloud.google.com/v1
kind: DeliveryPipeline
metadata:
  name: my-app-pipeline
description: Pipeline for my-app
serialPipeline:
  stages:
  - targetId: dev
    profiles: [dev]
  - targetId: staging
    profiles: [staging]
  - targetId: production
    profiles: [production]
    strategy:
      canary:
        runtimeConfig:
          cloudRun:
            automaticTrafficControl: true
        canaryDeployment:
          percentages: [25, 50, 75]
          verify: true

Targets

A target is a deployment destination — a GKE cluster, Cloud Run service, or Anthos cluster:

apiVersion: deploy.cloud.google.com/v1
kind: Target
metadata:
  name: dev
description: Development environment
run:
  location: projects/my-project/locations/europe-west1

---
apiVersion: deploy.cloud.google.com/v1
kind: Target
metadata:
  name: staging
description: Staging environment
run:
  location: projects/my-project/locations/europe-west1
requireApproval: false

---
apiVersion: deploy.cloud.google.com/v1
kind: Target
metadata:
  name: production
description: Production environment
run:
  location: projects/my-project/locations/europe-west1
requireApproval: true

Releases

A release is a specific version of your application (a container image) that progresses through the pipeline:

# Create a release
gcloud deploy releases create release-001 \
  --delivery-pipeline=my-app-pipeline \
  --region=europe-west1 \
  --images=my-app=europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/my-project/my-repo/my-app:v1.0.0

Rollouts

A rollout is the deployment of a release to a specific target. Each promotion creates a new rollout.

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Setting Up a Cloud Deploy Pipeline

Step 1: Define the Pipeline and Targets

# Apply the pipeline and target configuration
gcloud deploy apply --file=clouddeploy.yaml --region=europe-west1

Step 2: Create Skaffold Configuration

Cloud Deploy uses Skaffold to render and deploy manifests: