Promotion refers to moving API Gateway assets from the source stage to one or more target stages. For example, you might want to promote assets you have developed on servers in a Development stage (the source API Gateway instance) to servers in a QA or Production stage (the target API Gateway instance). When you promote an asset from one stage to another, the asset's metadata is copied from the source instance to the target instance.

Assets that are dependencies for the asset are also promoted. The required dependencies of an asset are always promoted with the asset. However, you can choose which optional dependencies are promoted at the time of promoting the asset. For example, at the time of promoting an API, the policies and aliases used by the API are always promoted. However, you can choose which dependent applications are promoted as applications an optional dependency for APIs. You can choose to promote all or no application, or select specific applications that you want to included with the API in the promotion.

The following table lists the required and optional dependencies of assets that are supported by promotion management.