The deployment production line

Testing and deployment can be a difficult and time-consuming process in complex environments comprising application servers, messaging infrastructure and interfaces to external systems. We have seen deployments take several days, even in cases where teams have used automated builds to ensure their code is fully tested. In this paper we describe principles and practices which allow new environments to be created, configured and deployed to at the click of a button. We show how to fully automate your testing and deployment process using a multi-stage automated workflow. Using this "deployment production line", it is possible to deploy fully tested code into production environments quickly and with full confidence that you can fall back to a previous version easily should a problem occur.