Except that Barbie is not kidding. Here is a link to an excellent post by Mr. Dan Diephouse (you know, the fellow who is responsible for XFire and is presently employed over at Mulesource).
For one, it is very refreshing to see a developer publicly acknowledge that deployment is a hard problem. I often get the impression that deployment gets taken for granted, or it is at least not publicly talked about or given much attention. It should though - what good is software if you can not get it installed and running on the target environment.
One of my primary functions at the day job is owning all technical aspects related the deployment of several web applications and web services with a fair number of interdependencies. While the post Dan made highlights the usage of some tools to help automate things, I have to admit that even getting to a point where you can automate can be pretty tough - especially in an environment where you have many dependencies to worry about (and to coordinate across multiple groups, such as DBAs since I have been instructed to not touch the data tier directly). At this point my automation is crude - a set of scripts that can pull down a build from a local maven repository and install it in a given container. It is ok, but because of certain things needing to happen in a certain (variable) order, most of the process remains manual.
What I would be curious to know is what other folks in the build and deployment business do to automate deployment to the environments in a full-proof (if possible) manner when there is variable sequential order involved? Any takers?
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