Release It!, 2nd Edition

Provisioning and Deployment Services

In Part III of this book, we look at how to design services and applications to be deployable. Here let’s look at the supporting infrastructure to perform the deployments themselves.

Deployment may be the most well-trodden area of operations tools. It’s an obvious nexus between development and production. To some organizations, deployment is “DevOps.” It’s understandable. In many organizations deployment is ridiculously painful, so it’s a good place to start making life better.

Consequently, a host of deployment tools represent “push” and “pull” methods. A push-style tool uses SSH or another agent so a central server can reach out to run scripts on the target machines. The machines may not know their ...