What deployment automation solutions must be on my short list for a windows platforms?

Question

We are looking for tools to orchestrate complex deployments. We use a variety of MS technologies (IIS 6, MS SQL, Windows 2003 Servers, .NET 4.0) and have developed point solutions of varying qualities for deployment of websites (lousy), databases (good), and other stuff (OK). Our major holes right now are gluing it all together (orchestration), validation, and configuration of raw servers.

I'm sure most of you writing web apps have the exact same problem - how to get your code out to the datacenter? What must be on our short list? Some examples to frame the question.

• cfengine: http://www.cfengine.org
• Chef (effectively Linux only, last I checked)
• Wikipedia has a comparison of open source configuration management tools, but it is a year or two out of date.

If there were a mono / .NET port of cfengine, I'd probably use that. I'll start separate questions if I need information about specific solutions, such as fluent migrator for database deployment, or various IIS web deployment schemes.

Answer 1

Hi Precipitous -

First of all, I am glad that you looking for tools instead of trying to build in-house solutions, that are normally not very scalable and are not well suited for the application release complexities you describe - especially when looking into multi-tier deployments.

A good tool that you should explore, and that definitely matches all your requirements, is Nolio ASAP (http://www.noliosoft.com). It will be able to orchestrate the deployment, including dependencies and sequencing between application tiers.

What's nice about Nolio, is that it comes with hundreds of application deployment actions, so you don't need to write any scripts for moving files around, updating IIS configuration settings, running SQL queries, replacing text in files, etc.

Cheers, Daniel