Service Delivery: The Deployment Phase - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 208

Chapter 10. Service Delivery: The Deployment Phase
Let 'er roll!
—Elvia Allman to Lucy and Ethel
Inthepreviouschapter weexamined thebuildphase,whichendswiththecreation ofasoft-
ware package. In this chapter we'll examine the deployment phase, which uses the package
to create a running service.
The deployment phase creates the service in one or more testing and production envir-
onments. Deciding if a release used in the testing environment is ready to be used in the
production environment requires approval.
The goal of the deployment phase is to create a running environment. This environment
is then used for testing or for live production services.
As Figure 9.1 (page 198) showed, packages are retrieved from the package repository
and then installed and configured to create an environment. The environment created may
be the testing environment, which is set up to verify that all the pieces of the system work
together.Itmayalsobetheliveenvironment, whichprovidesservicetousers.Alternatively,
it may be one of the other environments described previously in Section 9.1.1 .
10.1 Deployment-Phase Steps
There are three steps in the deployment phase: packages are promoted, installed, and con-
figured.
10.1.1 Promotion
The promotion stepiswherearelease isselected andpromoted foruseinthedesired envir-
onment. The desired version is selected and marked as the right version for the environment
being built.
For example, suppose building an environment requires three packages called A, B, and
C. Each trip through the build phase results in a new package. Package A has versions 1.1,
1.2, and 1.3. B has versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. There are more versions because there
have been more check-ins. C has versions 1.1 and 1.3 (1.2 is missing because there was a
build failure).
Let'ssaythatthecombinationofA-1.2,B-1.4,andC-1.3hasbeentestedtogetherandap-
proved for production. The promotion step would tell the package repository to mark them
as the designated production versions.