Deployments

Deployments are the boundary between ready and live. Approving a policy marks a version ready; only publishing a deployment changes what Metatate serves. Every answer — in the web preview and over MCP — is read from the current deployment publication's deployed instruction decisions, never from drafts, approved-but-unpublished versions, or an in-progress review.

What's live now

The Deployments page shows the current publication: the live bundle of policy versions and their deployed instruction decisions, with when it was published. This is the state agents are answering from right now — the in-app preview and the live MCP endpoint read the same published state, so what you verify in the app is what agents get.

Pending changes

Alongside the live state, you see what has changed since the last publication — approved policy versions and catalog changes that are ready but not yet live. Ready state accumulates safely: you can approve several policies over time and publish them together.

Review a deployment

Generating a review compares the ready state against the current publication and shows the impact as explicit actions: what will be created, updated, and deleted at the instruction level.

Two things are surfaced rather than smoothed over:

• Conflicts. Where instructions from different policies disagree about the same asset and scenario, the review shows the conflict and its sources. Conflicts are not collapsed into a silent winner.
• Unresolved targets. Where a policy targets something that doesn't resolve in the current catalog, the review lists it, and you must explicitly acknowledge unresolved targets before you can publish.

The review is derived state, not the source of truth. Leaving the review does not discard your approved changes, and if the ready state changes while a review is open, you regenerate the review from the fresh state.

Publish

Publishing applies the reviewed changes as a background job. On success, a new publication becomes current and the previous one is superseded. From that moment, answers are served from the new publication — this is the only mechanism that changes live behavior.

History

Past publications remain visible, and each records the policy versions it included, so you can see what was live and when.

Why this boundary exists

Agents need answers they can act on, which means answers must come from state a human reviewed and published — not from whatever was most recently edited. Decision-bearing tools return typed answers over published instruction state: answered, review_required, or not_enough_published_state. If nothing relevant has been published, the answer says so explicitly instead of guessing. See answer states for what each state means and how to respond to it.