Continuous deployment impressions at #JFall 2010, NL

Last week (november 3rd) Andrew Phillips and myself did a presentation on continuous deployment at the awful (so we thought) hour of 8 o’clock in the morning for the NLJUG. We only expected a handful of attendees but fortunately the day before we were told that we had moved to a bigger conference room because of the great number of people signing up! So at 8 o’clock we had about <100 people in the room! So, if you were there, thanks for coming so early, we really appreciate it. It of-course shows that continuous deployment is a hot topic 😉


So what did we actually talk about? Well…

1. Where we are now, continuous build/integration + storing the results of a build into a big safe aka repository?! and not getting it to the user who is expecting a working application
2. What the steps are of getting your application ready for continuous deployment
3. How to do your continuous deployment.
4. How to do a post-deployment test automatically after a successful deployment
5. and the live demo of-course 😉 By changing some code and checking it in via GIT, our continuous build server, started, building after it discovered the changed code, it kicked off Deployit (our deployment automation product) to do the deployment to a WebSphere Network Deployment Application Server + Apache HTTPD Server, finally Hudson, then triggered JMeter to test the deployed application, and we fed JMeter host information via Deployit, so it could connect to the right host!

All in all it was really cool to do the presentation + live working demo. We think continuous deployment is the next big step in the automation area for development. In the future well definitely go deeper into how we have set this up, by doing some Youtube videos, blog posts and present at more conferences!