Continuous Deployment

For the last 2 months, we’ve been using ControlTier to automate deployments to our integration and QA environments.  Our deployment is a little more complicated that most Java applications because it runs on a pseudo-grid.  That is, there are 2 clustered JBoss servers, a database server, and 4+ Linux servers that each run about 8 Java processes.

I was able to get ControlTier up and running in a few days, and defining the jobs was relatively straightforward.

Automation isn’t about quality, it’s about scale.  Manual processes don’t scale.

Each part of your process that you automate gets you one step closer to continuous deployment. For many teams, automation is a Quadrant 4 activity - not urgent, not important - but on my teams it is a Quadrant 2 activity - important but not urgent. We allocate time each iteration to improve our automation because it frees up more time for development.