Are you struggling with timely deployments? Do you wish to have hassle-free, smooth deployments across environments? Deployment Automation is the one-stop solution for all your deployment worries.

Timely feedback and quality testing of deployed software is crucial for faster releases. For this, the testing teams need to have access to the software to conduct comprehensive testing immediately after the code has been changed by the developers. However, in case of manual deployments, there are often delays.

Automation lets you mitigate the risk associated with production deployments. However, to ensure proper deployment, you should adopt this 3-step approach:

• Scripting

With scripts you can have certain actions triggered automatically in specific environments once specified conditions are fulfilled.

• Continuous Integration Servers

Applications can be automatically deployed as part of the build process with CI servers like Jenkins. The deployment is triggered with the help of scripts.

• Deployment Tools

Deployment tools such as Jenkins, Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM Urban Code, AWS CodeDeploy, Bamboo, Codar can help you automate your deployments.

While designing your automation deployment process, you can adopt these best practices:

1. Consistent Packages across Environments

As a practice, use the same package for every environment so that packages you deploy to production are the same ones you tested. This is possible by keeping environmentspecific configuration separate from packaging.

2. Same Deployment Process

Once you have put together your deployment process, ensure that it is the same for every environment, including production. By doing this, you would have tested your deployment process a few times before it is implemented for production.

3. Version Control

Ensure that you can recreate the state of any environment from the information saved in version control. This helps make deployments repeatable and also enables the state of production to be restored in a disaster recovery scenario.

4. Simplify the Process

While working on automating the deployment process, ensure that it is simple. Include these steps as part of the automation process:

• Package codes in a manner that they are suitable for deployment
• Create containers where possible
• Restart servers, applications and services
• Generate configuration files from templates
• Run automated deployment tests
• Take care of scripting and automating database migrations

By automating the deployment process, you can be assured of reliable, efficient and smooth deployments. This can further help you develop faster, improve productivity and mitigate errors occurring due to manual interventions. Partnering with a reliable service provider like MindCraft which has extensive experience in Deployment Automation, can help you get rid of your deployment woes.

So what do you do to deliver better applications in a faster and safer manner?