Chapter 4: Deployment Patterns

Overview

“What do you mean it doesn’t run in production? It ran fine in the development environment.” — Anonymous developer

Building enterprise class solutions involves not only developing custom software, but also deploying this software into a production server environment. This is where software development efforts intersect with systems infrastructure efforts. Bringing these two disciplines together effectively requires a common understanding of the issues involved and a strong set of application and system infrastructure skills. The required skills are rarely found in a single team; therefore, deployment activities often involve the collaboration of several teams, with each team contributing specialized skills. To simplify discussion, this chapter assumes that there are two teams: the application development team and the system infrastructure team.