Deploying Without a Web

The overwhelming and at times exclusive focus of release engineering today is on Web-driven applications. The focus of this presentation is on some of the challenges and even dangers faced in other types of deployments when the safety net of Web-oriented releases is taken away. Web releases are strikingly homogeneous and determined; there is one current codebase, sitting on one underlying infrastructure, which (at least on the server side) is under the complete control of the engineers. Three representative deployment situations, taken as an example from what we face at Portware, illustrate how heterogeneous non-Web releases can be much more problematic.

Daniel Cordes is the manager of the DevOps team at Portware LLC, a financial company in downtown Manhattan. He has been in the industry for almost 10 years. He has Masters degrees in Political Theory from Columbia University and the City of New York Graduate Center.