Ozone releases are an abstraction over pipelines and proprietary approval stages. With releases, you can add gated approval steps prior to or after the execution of a pipeline.
In addition you can listen to external events such as pushes to a git repository and have them triggered automatically
A typical scenario for a release is as follows:
A developer commits to a git repository
The system builds and starts automation scans
A possible manual approval step is needed to be sent to an external system
The image is promoted manually to the next environment