Approaches for service deployment

Traditional IT service-deployment technologies are based on scripts and configuration files, but their limited ability to express dependencies and verify configurations results in hard-to-use and erroneous system configurations. Emerging language- and model-based tools promise to address these deployment challenges, but their benefits aren't yet clearly established. The authors compare manual, script-, language-, and model-based deployment solutions in terms of scale, complexity, expressiveness, and barriers to first use.