I just attended Dave Thomas’s keynote at RailsConf. He had many interesting things to say, most notably that 60%+ of his Java-centric conference-circuit friends, mostly people who have written books on Java, speak regularly on Java, and have lots of experience as Java “architects”, are now making a living with Ruby / Rails.
Dave talked about 3 key areas where Rails should improve. The one I want to focus on is deployment. Rails has Capistrano, a slick tools for deployment automation. Capistrano is great, but it misses the boat in one key way: it is push-based. It assumes a world where the developer sets up, controls, and performs deployment to production servers. That is of course the case at the start of a small operation, but it doesn’t scale; in large organization, or even in small growing ones, sooner or later there is staff dedicated to production deployment and monitoring, separate from development.
One way, to me right way, to handle deployment is push / pull:
For the “push”, a developer uploads a new version to a storage site somewhere. It travels in the form of an archive file (ZIP, tgz, whatever) which contains all of the needed artifacts, as well as metadata about the required libraries, pre- and post-install steps, etc. for the new version. It has a unique name; it lands at a URL. Normal, off the shelf technology (FTP, web servers, etc.) can be used to serve and secure this storage, implement policies about who can upload new versions, etc. This upload happens with some simple one-line command (or as part of an auto-build); it does not actually put a new version in production, but only makes it available for pulling.
Then, on a production machine, someone with software installation rights on that machine (administrated by the normal tools – not by any special feature of the deployment mechanism) runs a command (something like “deploy staging http://ourserver/project1/project1-build-3453.tgz”) which downloads the new build, runs various sanity checks, deploys it to a staging area, and makes it available to try out. Once the staging is verified, a similar command brings it in to live production. These builds refer as needed to configuration data on the deployment machines (such as production DB access credentials); the build archives are generic, not specific to any particular production machine.
The main idea behind this is that each person has the rights they need for the work they need to do, and these rights don’t need any special help or support from the deployment mechanism. Developers don’t need any special rights on deployment machines, nor to deployers need any special rights on development machine
I wrote this in the context of a Rails / Ruby talk, but it’s at least as relevant in Java and Delphi world; in fact at Oasis Digital we need something like this on a Java project and a Delphi project right now.
