Solutions for automated deployment in developer environments?

Question

I am setting up an automated deployment environment for a number of decoupled services that are in active development. While I am comfortable with the automated deployment/configuration management aspect, I am looking for strategies on how best to structure the deployment environment to make things a bit easier for developers. Some things to take into consideration:

1. Developers are generally building web applications, web services, and daemons -- all of which talk to one another over HTTP, sockets, etc.
2. The developers may not have all running on their locally machine, but still need to be able to quickly do end to end testing by pointing their machine at the environment

My biggest concern with continuous deployment is that we have a large team and I do not want to constantly be restarting services while developers working locally against those remote servers. On the flip side, delaying deployments to this development environment makes integration testing much more difficult. Can you recommend a strategy that you have used in this situation in the past that was worked well?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Continuous integration doesn't have to mean continuous deployment. You can compile/unit test/etc the code "continuously" thoughout the day without deploying it and only deploy at night. This is often a good idea anyway - to deploy at night or on demand - since people may be integration testing during the day and wouldn't want the codebase to change out from under them.

Consider, how much of the software can developers test locally? If a lot, they shouldn't need the environment constantly. If not a lot, it would be good to set up mocks/stubs so much more can be tested on a local server. Then the deployed environment is only needed for true integration testing and doesn't need to be update constantly throughout the day.

Answer 2

I'd suggest setting up a CI server (Hudson?) and use this to control all deployments to both your QA and production servers. This forces you to automate all aspects of deployment and ensures that the are no ad-hoc restarts of the system by developers.

I'd further suggest that you consider publishing your build output to a repository manager like Nexus , Artifactory or Archiva. In that way deployment scripts could retrieve any version of a previous build. The use of a repository manager would enable your QA team to certify a release prior to it's deployment onto production.

Finally, consider one of the emerging deployment automation tools. Tools like chef, puppet, ControlTier can be used to further version control the configuration of your infrastructure.