2010-07-25 Sunday - DevOps resource links to read later

I'm crunched for time today - but want to remember to come back and read these links:

 http://edmund.haselwanter.com/en/blog/2008/08/26/automated-environment-puppet-iclassify-and-capistrano/

http://www.agileweboperations.com/sprinkle-automated-infrastructure-for-the-rest-of-us/

http://subbu.posterous.com/poor-mans-automated-deployment-aka-ugly-capis

http://hivelogic.com/articles/deploying-expressionengine-github-capistrano

http://www.thebitguru.com/articles/9-Setting+up+Capistrano+on+Site5

http://www.slideshare.net/eljefe/automated-deployment-with-phing

http://www.rubyinside.com/capistrano-20-flexible-automated-deployment-system-541.html

http://code.google.com/p/bungeni-dspace/wiki/InstallingDspaceUsingCapistrano

2009-01-17 Saturday - Deployment Tool Research

I'm doing some further research on deployment tools, here are a few links and resources I've come across recently:

Colin Low (with updates by Julio Guijarro: SmartFrog Tutorial - (Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol)

Let us suppose you are developing an application with several autonomous components. These components could be parts of a distributed application, with components distributed across multiple hosts. It is necessary to test the individual components, and you realise that to test component1 you will need to have each of component2 to component7 in place. Whenever you run a test, you will have to activate seven components with all the correct configuration parameters. You may have to carry this out dozens of times until testing is complete.

Ritu Sabharwal: Grid Infrastructure Deployment using SmartFrog Technology - (Hewlett-Packard (STSD), Bangalore, India)

smartfrog.org/

sourceforge.net/projects/smartfrog/

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Wojtek Goscinski and David Abramson, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Application Deployment over Heterogeneous Grids using Distributed Ant

Abstract
"The construction of large scale e-Science grid experiments presents a challenge to e-Scientists because of the inherent difficulty of deploying applications over large scale heterogeneous grids. In spite of this, user-oriented application deployment has remained unsupported in grid middleware. This lack of support for application deployment is strongly detrimental to the usability, evolution, uptake and continual development of the grid. This paper presents our motivation, design and implementation of the Distributed Ant user-oriented application deployment system, including recent extensions to support application deployment over heterogeneous grids. We also present a significant Distributed Ant deployment case study, demonstrating how a user-oriented application deployment system enables e-Science experiments."

Proceedings of the First International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing

Pages: 361 - 368
Year of Publication: 2005
ISBN:0-7695-2448-6

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Its also useful to look at how large vendors implement their deployment tooling/strategy:

Oracle® Containers for J2EE Deployment Guide, Using OC4J Ant Tasks for Deployment

WebSphere Application Server documentation

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Ant in Anger: Using Apache Ant in a Production Development System, by Steve Loughran

2008-11-09 Sunday - Automated Deployment

I've been thinking about how to simplify the automation of deploying (and potentially rolling back) some of the infrastructure configuration files, components, business rules, etc. of a Service Oriented Architecture.

This is particularly challenging if you are seeking to leverage a substantial collection of heterogenous Open Source tools.

Capistrano was mentioned by Martin Fowler in his paper on Continous Integration.

http://capify.org/

Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.

Websphere: Automated Deployment of Enterprise Application Updates, Part 1 - Basic concepts

TFS Deployer interfaces the Team Foundation Server build store with PowerShell allowing script execution to be triggered across multiple machines when a user transitions the quality indicator of a build from one state to another.

Robocopy

A command-line directory replication command. It was available as part of the Windows Resource Kit, and introduced as a standard feature of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Ayende Rahien: Requirements 101: Have an automated deployment

IBM Developerworks: Automatic deployment toolkit for an SOA project environment, Part 4: The automatic Build-Deploy-BVT toolkit for SOA projects