Deployment process automation

[Leonid Mirsky]

Hi All,

We are current using a manual process of deploying application upgrades to production.

Although the production guys aren't doing everything by hand, they have their automation tools to help them automate some parts of the process, the main flow of the deployment is managed using a specs documentation supplied by R&D for each version.

We decided that we would like to automate this process (it's about time you may say), and of course started by looking up tools which can assist us in that.

The main requirements are:

1. Ability to retrieve the environment data from CMDB. For example, if I want to upgrade from 3.2.1 to 3.2.2, I would like to dynamically retrieve which servers are having the 3.2.1 version installed, and run the upgrade automated process only on these servers.
   
2. Dashboard with a deployment process progress and general workplan details
   
3. Easy integration possibilities since we plan to build a lot on top of this platform.
   

Any suggestions on relevant tools, or just some general thoughts on the subject, are more than welcome!

[Ran Tavory]

check out how things were done at outbrain, it may or may not suit your particular needs but at least inspire.

(I wrote those)

http://prettyprint.me/2011/01/24/continuous-deployment-at-outbrain/

http://prettyprint.me/2011/07/31/visualizing-our-deployment-pipeline/

In short: for "infrastructure" deployments we use chef.

For app deployments we use glu. It has real time monitoring, it's push based and has a nice API. It's a young tool driven by a motivated skilled person.

--

/Ran

[Eishay Smith]

Would you like to have something like this?

http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/09/devops-cafe-on-continuous-deployment.html

Btw, I recommend you'll be ready to pick some good tools (like zookeeper) and customize it to your own needs as you'll never find the perfect thing that combines all of your requirements. 

[Leonid Mirsky]

Thank you guys.

I will update you all on the progress!