Deployments in the Windows Update for Business deployment service

Deployments are the foundation of the Windows Update for Business deployment service. Through a deployment, you can target a set of devices to receive specific content from Windows Update, such as a software update.

Deployments have the following key aspects:

1. Content: The update available to deploy from the catalog. This is represented by the content property of the deployableContent type.
2. Audience: The devices to receive content. This is an audience relationship of the deploymentAudience type.
3. Policy: The entity that governs the deployment of content to an associated deployment audience. This is a policy relationship of the updatePolicy type.
4. Settings: The settings governing how and when content should be delivered to devices. This is represented by the settings property of the deploymentSettings type.
5. State: The current state of the deployment within its lifecycle. This is represented by the state property of the deploymentState type.

Create a deployment with content and an audience

Because content and audience are key to the definition of a deployment, you're required to assign both at the time of creation. While content and audience assignments cannot be changed later, device membership within an audience can.

To learn more about creating a deployment, see Deploy a feature update, Deploy an expedited security update, and Manage driver update.

Configure settings

Schedule

Schedule settings govern how the content is deployed over time to devices in the deployment audience. You can configure schedule settings for deployments of feature updates.

To learn more about schedule settings, see Schedule a deployment.

Monitoring

You can use monitoring settings to configure alerts and automated actions to take based on update signals from devices. Monitoring settings can be configured for deployments of feature updates.

To learn more about monitoring settings, see Manage monitoring rules.

User experience

For deployments of expedited quality updates, user experience settings temporarily override existing policies on the device for update experience.

To learn more about user experience settings, see Deploy an expedited security update.

Get or set lifecycle state

States

Deployments move through lifecycle states as described in the following table.

State	Description
scheduled	The deployment is waiting for offer conditions to be met to start offering the update to devices.
offering	The deployment is offering the update to devices.
paused	The deployment is paused and prevented from offering the update to devices until it's unpaused.
faulted	The deployment is not offering the update to devices due to a reason the service cannot resolve.

Transitions

Transition	Condition
scheduled → offering	Scheduling condition is met.
offering → scheduled	Scheduling condition is not met.
scheduled or offering → paused	There is a request or automatic action to pause.
paused → scheduled or offering	There is no longer a request or automatic action to pause.
offering, scheduled, or paused → faulted	There is an error that the service cannot resolve.

Resource model

The deployment resource has a state property of type deploymentState which provides information about the current lifecycle state.

The service determines the effective value of the deployment state as a net result of several inputs and asynchronous processes, but you can request a particular value by setting requestedValue as one of these inputs. Other inputs to the effective deployment state value include schedule settings and monitoring settings.

Assign a device to multiple deployments

You can assign a device to multiple deployments at one time. These deployments can be for content of the same update category (for example all deployments are feature updates), or for content of different update categories.

When you assign a device to two deployments for content of different update categories (for example, a feature update and an expedited quality update), the deployment service offers content in a sequence according to Microsoft’s recommendation.

When you assign a device to two deployments for content of the same update category (for example, feature update versions 20H1 and 20H2, or quality updates from March 2021 and April 2021, or driver version 1.0.0.0 published January 2023 and 1.0.0.1 published February 2023), the deployment service offers the content that is higher ranked by Microsoft. For feature updates and quality updates, more recent updates are higher ranked. For driver updates, applicable updates are typically ranked by version and publication date. This behavior does not apply if one of the deployments is still scheduled for the device and is not ready to offer content. In that case, the other deployment delivers content to the device.