In a Salesforce environment, what is commonly used alongside metadata to describe deployment operations?

In a Salesforce environment, deployment operations are often described through environment variables. These variables provide context and configuration settings specific to the environment in which the deployment is taking place. By utilizing environment variables, teams can define information such as API endpoints, credentials, or specific configurations that may differ from one environment to another (like development, testing, and production).

Environment variables enhance the flexibility and adaptability of deployment processes, enabling consistent behavior across various stages and ensuring that deployments can be customized without making manual changes to the deployment scripts or metadata each time. This practice helps to reduce errors and streamline the deployment workflow, as the necessary configurations can be simply altered by updating the environment variable settings.

In contrast, while container variables, custom scripts, and resource files may play important roles in deployment workflows, they do not typically provide the same level of contextual description regarding the specifics of the deployment environment as environment variables do.