Strategic Technology: Application Deployment Automation (UrbanCode Deploy)

Continuous Integration and other modern code development practices seek to manage scale and complexity, and increase speed and quality, by introducing automation across the software development life cycle (SDLC).  This is especially true of areas that occur frequently and contain many repetitive steps such as the deployment and release processes.

Development teams tend to build and deploy the code for one or more components to a development test server frequently as part of an agile development process in order to find code integration problems early and make sure they have a clear understanding of the status of a project.  However, this can be a laborious and tedious process, screaming for automation.

Additionally, the complexity of releasing enterprise applications to production requires that the release process be well-tested beforehand, and increasingly development teams are finding that the best time to start this testing is during development and early testing efforts.  This requires that the development team use the same process and tools during development that the operations team will use in production.

Application Deployment Automation solutions, such as Urban Code Deploy, facilitate the process of deploying components to servers and releasing them into production.  Urban Code Deploy controls the process, versions deployment artifacts, keeps a record of who deployed what to where, and facilitates incremental deployments.