Re: Experiences with deployment solutions

Deployment is the act of taking a piece of software and installing it onto a server, applying configuration as necessary.

A deployment tool is a package manager. Various OSes use rpm, deb, msi, dmg, etc. Some languages provide their own methods (CPAN, RubyGems, PyPi, NPM, etc). At its heart, it's a tarball with metadata.

So, rex is not a deployment tool. It is a provisioning tool. And a poor one, at that.

Chef, Puppet, Cfengine, Ansible, and Salt are NOT deployment tools. They are provisioning tools. They ensure that certain packages and scripts have been executed on the target server.

Vagrant is NOT a deployment tool. It is a virtualization manager. (It's actually a sugar layer on top of other virtualization managers.)

Just because these tools are written in Ruby doesn't make them poor. Ruby is an excellent language to do OS work in, much better than Perl.

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Comment on Re: Experiences with deployment solutions

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Re^2: Experiences with deployment solutions by McA (Priest) on Feb 25, 2014 at 23:32 UTC
Hi, never thought about the subtle differences of terminology. I found this article http://java.dzone.com/articles/deployment-automation-vs-0 which tries to bring light into the differences and seems to be interesting. Rex calls itself a tool for "Deployment & Configuration Management". On the start page of Chef I found: "...Chef can automate how you configure, deploy and scale your servers and applications...". So, the term "deploy" is there too. On the Puppet site I found at http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-enterprise: "...quickly deploy critical applications...". Also there is the term "deploy" used. Ansible says on the homepage (http://www.ansible.com/home): "...Ansible automates app deployment, ..." On an introduction page of Salt (http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/) I found: "...Providing versatility between massive scale deployments...". So it seems that Salt is used for deployments too. http://cfengine.com/ was dead at the moment when I tried to look at. Probably they tried to provision something. But anyways: My total naivety in this domain let me subsume these tools or toolsets as deployment tools. What I meant are tools which help me to automate the installation of software packages and the required prerequisites on servers to run services/applications. Thank you for pointing out that there are some important differences in terminology. To your other comment: I totally agree with your opinion: "Just because these tools are written in Ruby doesn't make them poor.". But this was also something nobody insisted in. Best regards McA	[reply]
Re^2: Experiences with deployment solutions by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 25, 2014 at 20:35 UTC
Ruby is an excellent language to do OS work in, much better than Perl. Could you please elaborate? And maybe define OS work?	[reply]
Re^3: Experiences with deployment solutions by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jul 28, 2015 at 17:39 UTC
OS work is work that sysadmins or operations teams tend to do vs development teams. That's probably the best example. As for why Ruby over Perl? I gave a presentation on this at CodeMash 2015 My criteria for good software: Does it work? Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?	[reply]


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