US Patent 9880837 Artifact manager for release automation

An artifact manager generates an abstraction for artifacts and repositories in a deployment platform such that the artifacts may be located uniformly and securely in each deployment environment during the deployment process. The described system includes a release automation platform having a release pipeline which is responsible for deploying build artifacts into multiple deployment environments, testing the build artifacts thoroughly in each environment, and follow organization-specific approval processes to promote the build artifacts to a next deployment environment.