A Short History of Deployment Processes
Learn about the history of deployment processes.
The beginning
In the beginning, there were no package managers, because there were no other package formats (like JAR, WAR, RPM, and DEB). Package managers maintain a database of software dependencies and version information to prevent software mismatches and missing prerequisites. The best we could do at that time was to zip files that formed a release by manually copying files from one place to another. When this practice was combined with bare-metal servers, which were intended to last forever, the result was disastrous. After some time, no one knew what had been installed on the servers. Constant overwrites, reconfigurations, package installations, and mutable types of actions resulted in unstable, unreliable, and undocumented software running on top of countless OS patches.
Configuration management tools
The emergence ...