Release It!, 2nd Edition

Phases of Deployment

It’s no surprise that continuous deployment first arose in companies that use PHP. A deployment in a PHP application can be as simple as copying some files onto a production host. The very next request to that host picks up the new files. The only thing to worry about is a request that comes in while the file is only partially copied.

Near the other end of the spectrum, think about a five-million-line Java application, built into one big EAR file. Or a C# application with a couple hundred assemblies. These applications will take a long time to copy onto the target machine and then a large runtime process to restart. They’ll often have in-memory caches and database connection pools to initialize.

We can fill in the middle ...