In today’s world, after the recent DevOps movement, the need to automate is strong, not only within enterprise development teams, but solo developers and small agencies as well. Let’s now examine the qualitative components that an automated deployment tool should have in order to provide efficient, error-free releases for your application and eventually save time which can be then invested into making the application better.
Deploy automatically, when new commits are pushed
Let’s admit it, we’ve all forgotten to deploy our changes at some point, which confused the client or another team member. Having a manual deployment process, either via FTP or some local command line tool, we add an additional step to our development workflow which can easily be automated.
While there are simple solutions like bash scripts in git hooks, it’s not always feasible, safe or convenient to do so plus, these processes are usually customised around the needs of a certain project instead of providing a generic, reusable solution. Automated deployment tools like Stackmate, solve this problem by queueing deployments right when a commit is being added in the codebase and execute in a linear manner.
Run complex pipelines, across multiple servers, avoiding human error
Modern web applications are not as simple as they used to be and usually, there’s a need to run a complex pipeline before they can be served to the public. Tasks like dependency installations, cache invalidations, asset publishing etc, are common amongst modern apps and usually need to be executed across multiple servers whenever a new version gets released.
Additionally, the more complex the build process is, the harder it gets for the person deploying the app to avoid mistakes that might introduce additional debugging time or even crash the app. An automated deployment tool should be able to tackle a pipeline and handle build-tasks without manual intervention, making room for a repeatable, predictable and stable build process.
Manage & deploy configuration
Configuration management is one of the trickiest problems when building & maintaining a web application. Now let’s imagine there’s a need for a sandbox environment that requires different configuration, or we need to have various environment variables because we’re applying the 12-factor app methodology. Application configuration should be easy to access or update and an automated deployment tool should offer a clear way for doing so.
Roll back when things go south
Sometimes, things don’t go as planned. An exploding error rate on your monitoring tool or sudden irresponsiveness of the app, are better solved when there’s peace of mind after you’ve switched to the previous stable version. Having the ability to roll back to a previous stable version is a key feature for any deployment tool since it basically buys the developer time and debugging efforts.
Save time with Stackmate. Lots of it
An automated deployment tool saves time. Provides peace of mind when it comes to propagating new releases to your application’s servers and lets you focus on building better & more efficient applications.
We, developers, don’t usually have the time or will to focus on DevOps, even though there are tons of benefits by adopting a DevOps culture. At Stackmate we share the same pain, hence we went the extra mile and provided tools where you can manage your application’s deployment and infrastructure efficiently, practically without any effort. We set up your entire infrastructure, deploy when you push new code, we discover and suggest your application’s build pipeline and we manage all of your application’s configuration, from environment variables to cron jobs.
If you wish to know more, please add your email in the box below and we’ll reach out for a 10′ demo.