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A series of activities that makes a program available for use (usually in test or production environments)

Deployment consists in a series of activities needed to get a program available for use outside a development environment (for example on web sites, PCs, smartphones and/or tablets).

At a high level, deployment activities need to:

  • compile the program in a suitable packaging format;
  • distribute the program to the final environment (e.g. via the Internet, an app store or CDs);
  • install dependencies (usually libraries, runtimes and application servers);
  • configure the target environment (e.g. where the database is or runtime parameters of the application server).

A deployment can be done in several ways according to the program type, for example:

  • to deploy a web application written in Java we can add JARs to web containers;
  • to deploy a desktop application on Windows we can create a setup program and burn it to CDs;
  • to deploy an application to a cloud environment (like Heroku or Windows Azure) we can use ad-hoc programs or widely known programs like git that trigger a series of operations on the server side;
  • to deploy an application to an app store we may need to send the application to the store owner for approval. If the application is approved then the store owner will publish the new version, making it available to the users;
  • a deployment may require to distribute specially configured virtual machines with the right version of software and dependencies.

There are many challenges in deployment revolving around two main themes:

  • to ensure that programs exhibit the same behavior in production as they do in testing and development. To achieve this, usually there are several test environments (beyond development) in which the software is deployed and tested thoroughly before being released in the production environment. is the strategy of deploying to a subset of users to detect production-only errors with minimal user impact.
  • to be able to rollback to a previous stable version in case the current version behaves erratically. The deployment environment may help by providing some facilities to retain previous versions and install them when needed. is a deployment strategy which enables fast, robust release and rollback.

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