deployment automation tools

Jirong  Hu's picture
Jirong Hu asked on March 17, 2013 - 10:11pm | Replies (2).

After the automated release build, we stage the versioned (with build tag) build result/deployment unit in a network shared drive. Normally I see people do it setup a web page to list these deployment units, then have a couple of buttons next them. When a button called "deploy to DEV" is click, the deployment unit is copied to the target DEV sever and got deployed.

There are lots of build automation tools to generate the deployment unit, but what tools can do the rest? I mean automatically list these deployment units and have buttons, etc.?

Thanks

Jirong

2 Answers

Bob Aiello's picture

Hi Jirong,

there are many deployment frameworks being developed and marketed these days. Puppet and Chef are the two open source tools commonly used for provisioning servers. There are others and many of the commercial tools are also becoming very popular.

What features are you looking for?
What technologies and platforms are you working in?
How many releases are you anticipating?
(Be careful this grows quickly when you are successful!)

Bob Aiello
Technical Editor, CM Crossroads

Jirong  Hu's picture
Jirong Hu replied on May 15, 2013 - 3:42pm.

Thanks, Bob.

I am a SCM engineer using ClearCase for version control and BuildForge to do the build automation. I am looking at a solution for the deployment. While I was trying to build my own web application, I thought there must be something out there to do the same.

What features are you looking for?

1. Able to list all build result (deployment unit,e.g. in a zip file) in a directory or binary repository in  a web page.

2. Have a couple of buttons to click, say deploy this zip file to DEV environment.

 

What technologies and platforms are you working in?

At this moment, it's Java.

 

How many releases are you anticipating? 

Once a day to the DEV environment for each application.

I am looking at these two you mentioned, Chef and Puppet, not sure if I need that complehensive. I was thinking click a button and the underline deployment script to take the zip to the server and do the installation.

Jirong

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