Those who attended the DevOps: IT’s Automation Revolution webcast last week (recording here), won’t be surprised by my favorite slide from Glenn O’Donnell’s portion of the presentation. He discussed the challenge of moving a complex application through environments, and the likelihood of “droping the ball” and missing a piece when you go to production.

To address that challenge, Glenn suggested that you create a package containing all the components and make that the granularity for deployment. With all the components tied together, you can’t forget a piece or deploy versions that haven’t been tested together to production.

A "Package" ties versions of various components into a version of the application.

At UrbanCode, we love this approach. After a few years of helping AnthillPro customers approximate this with the dependency subsystem, we built uDeploy around the concept of an application model, and a Snapshot Deployment. The Snapshot in uDeploy is a virtual package, that ties together versions of all the components, without creating a single monolithic binary.  It was exciting to see a great analyst explain the rationale for this approach so clearly.

Want to learn more? Check out uDeploy or let us know that you’d like a private demo for your team.