In regards to the customers needing an ops pipeline to create images, that isn't necessary to use Release. We have our own build infrastructure, running on Docker Buildx so we can take your code, turn it into container images and deploy it without you needing to have anything set up yourself aside from a working Dockerfile.
But there may be customers who do already have their own pipeline setup running tests and creating images so we did create an external API for shipping those images to us [1]. Creating full fledged integrations with other service providers is something we've thought of exploring, but for now it would be possible to create an environment via a POST call with the image information and a bit of pre-setup to make sure we can pull the images from where you've stored them.
What you describe in (b) is definitely possible right now. The `git push` will send the webhook to us, we'll create the image and automatically deploy the environment. What you describe in (a) is also something we think is important. We have an integration with LaunchDarkly [2] that has pre and post deployment hooks so building out features around those type of hooks for different use cases is something we want to lean into. Another example in the (b) category is our Instant Datasets [3] which gives you an RDS instance with pre-filled data to be used for say a sales demo or a QA validation.
[1] - https://docs.releasehub.com/api-documentation/release-api/cr... [2] - https://docs.releasehub.com/integrations/integrations-overvi... [3] - https://docs.releasehub.com/reference-guide/instant-datasets