Deployment Tools
Deployment tools streamline the process of distributing software and updates, usually via scheduling or automation, so that developers can focus on more critical tasks. They also allow developers to collaborate on projects, track progress, and manage changes.
With the explosion of DevOps, continuous deployment (CD) has become an increasingly popular practice. It involves automatically releasing code that passes the automated testing phase into production, making updates available to users faster and more frequently. For businesses that release on a daily or near-daily basis, CD is an option that should be strongly considered.
Although continuous delivery and continuous deployment share the same abbreviation (CD), delivery is actually the precursor to deployment. The distinction between the two lies in the final manual approval step before production release. Continuous delivery includes the manual approval step, while continuous deployment doesn’t. In a continuous deployment environment, every source code change is deployed automatically without explicit approval. Essentially, the developer’s job is complete after merging to the master branch. CI/CD tools take over from there by running all the tests, deploying to production, and keeping team members updated on important events with monitoring and notifications.
For the purposes of this article, we will largely stick to discussing continuous deployment, since it is becoming the industry standard for many businesses. Consumer web companies such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Netflix all use CD to release features and fixes.
What are Deployment Tools?
To get an application up and running in any given environment, deployment tools are a necessity. Some tools (such as CircleCI and Codeship) can handle everything from automatically building and testing code, to deploying it and reporting errors back to the team. The best tools can scale from a single application to an enterprise IT portfolio, making it easy to coordinate deployment actions across multiple interdependent systems at once.
When selecting a deployment tool, consider the following:
1. Complexity of your deployment landscape
2. Custom scripting vs. out-of-the-box content
3. On-premise vs. self-hosted
4. Plugins and customizability
5. Ease of use for non-experts
6. Support for multiple languages and platforms
7. Scalability
8. Reporting
9. Auditability & compliance
10. Microservices
Benefits of Deployment Tools
The concept at the core of CD is that teams should be deploying new features and fixes all the time to supply a constant stream of value to the end user. As soon as code is ready to go out, it should be released and put into the hands of customers as fast as possible. In addition, because small iterative changes are constantly being added to the product, users don’t experience any upheavals that can cause confusion. Instead, a series of small simple changes add up over time, becoming big changes in a process of continual evolution.
On the business side, automation of the deployment process allows engineers to focus on business needs rather than infrastructure overhead, thereby saving time and money. It also reduces the need for custom scripting, helps to meet audit and compliance requirements, accelerates delivery velocity, and accelerates feedback cycles.
From a high-level perspective, deployment tools provide a single view across all applications and environments and connect your existing tools into harmonious workflow.
Deployment Tools
Deploy apps and infrastructure on your cloud in minutes. Support for custom and third-party app deployments on Kubernetes and Lambda environments. Argonaut immensely benefits high-growth startup teams building cloud-first applications. Argonaut’s users save weeks’ worth of infrastructure setup time and tens of thousands of dollars on infrastructure maintenance costs.
Capistrano is a framework for building automated deployment scripts. It is written in Ruby, but can easily be used to deploy projects of any language or framework, be it Rails, Java, or PHP. It is most commonly used to deploy web applications.
Codefresh is an enterprise continuous delivery platform for cloud-native applications. It automates GitOps workflows and advanced deployments such as Canary and Blue/Green. The first-class Kubernetes integration makes it easier to adopt a "per branch" continuous delivery deployment. This powerful feature can be leveraged together with the templating features and pipeline variables to really standardize and simplify CI/CD across an organization.
Flosum is a native DevOps solution that handles the development lifecycle including merging components, version control, continuous deployments, static code analysis, user story management, and regression testing. Flosum works together with Salesforce to identify changes in a particular component.
Harness Continuous Delivery is a software delivery solution that automatically deploys, verifies, and rolls back artifacts. You can leverage automated canary and blue-green deployments for faster, safer, and more efficient rollouts. Additionally, you have the option to automatically roll back to a previous version when bad deployments are detected by applying machine learning to data and logs from observability solutions.
Juju is an open source application and service modeling tool from Ubuntu that helps you deploy, manage and scale your applications on any cloud. With Juju, different authors are able to create service formulas, called charms, independently, and make those services coordinate their communication and configuration through a simple protocol. Juju can also be used together with Orchestra for physical deployments.
LaunchDarkly is a feature management application that enables teams to deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn't ready to be released to all users. Wrapping code with feature flags allows for testing features and infrastructure, without impacting the wrong users. It’s especially good for development purposes in case any feature needs to be toggled on/off.
Octopus Deploy is a user-friendly release management, deployment automation and DevOps solution. It's used to deploy .NET, Java and other applications to test, staging and production environments on-premises or in the cloud.
Rundeck is an open source operations management platform that helps to automate routine operational procedures in data center or cloud environments. It enables you to run tasks on any number of nodes from a web-based or command-line interface. It provides other features that make it easier to scale scripting efforts, including access control, workflow building, scheduling, logging, and integration with external sources for node and option data.
Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform. It was initially developed internally by Netflix to help development teams release software changes with velocity and confidence. It provides two core sets of features: cluster management and deployment management.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy is a tool for automating application deployments through your environments. It is designed to facilitate rapid feedback and continuous delivery in agile development while providing the audit trails, versioning and approvals needed in production.
XebiaLabs Deploy is an enterprise-scale application release automation solution. It is agentless across all target platforms, meaning that you can easily configure firewalls and security appliances, routers, mobile devices, and all the target systems you would normally have to install a proprietary agent to reach.
