US Patent 10915312 Lifecycle management of virtual compute templates

A method of updating templates includes maintaining libraries of the templates at a lifecycle management server to track versions and locations of the templates respectively stored in source, development, testing, and production data centers, copying a first template from the source data center to the development data center, storing the first template that has been updated at the development data center in the testing data center and performing unit testing on the updated first template at the testing data center, and upon successful unit testing, copying the updated first template from the development data center to the source data center and releasing the updated first template into production by storing the updated first template in the production data center. The library of the templates indicates the first template, prior to the update, as a first version, and after the update, as a later, second version.