Deployment is the act of taking components and readying them for productive
use. There may be steps following deployment, such as installation or management
related functions, but all decisions about how to configure and compose/assemble
a component are made at the deployment stage. This is therefore
the one opportunity in the software lifecycle to bridge the gap between what
the component developer couldn’t know about the deployment environment and
what the environment’s developer couldn’t know about the open set of deployable
components.