15 Automating deployment: CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, and Packer

About 20 years ago, we rented our first virtual machine. Our goal was to deploy WordPress, a content management system. To do so, we logged in to the machine using SSH, downloaded WordPress, installed the scripting language PHP and the web server Apache, edited the configuration files, and started the web server.

To this day, the following steps for deploying software—whether open source, proprietary, or homegrown—have remained the same:

  1. Fetch source code or binaries

  2. Install dependencies

  3. Edit configuration files

  4. Start services

These activities are also summarized under the term configuration management. The two main reasons for why automating deployments is a must-have ...

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