A couple of years back I went on a crusade against manual deployment of pretty much everything in Ephox. It was originally driven by a desire to “dog food” our products so we needed to automatically deploy each nightly build to our internal systems. From there it went out to automatic releases (still problematic due to a dodgy FTP server at our hosting provider) and got a fancy webapp front end that let you pick which version to deploy.

It’s really paid off by giving us up to date, real world feedback on the quality of our products and by saving us a lot of time in deployment but every so often it pays off big time by letting us roll back to a working version.

We have a new product coming out early next year which we’re already using on our intranet. The team working on it added in a really important initial configuration step today which will make deploying it much easier for our clients – great step forward. Except of course that our intranet is on a variant of the architecture for a variety of technical and historical reasons and that initial configuration step just doesn’t apply there. Thus, our entire intranet was suddenly replaced by a “Welcome to the intranet, please configure me” page which couldn’t actually configure anything and wouldn’t go away. Simple mistake to make and it turns out easy to fix, but it was really nice to just push a big red button (literally) and have a working version automatically deployed and everything go back to normal.

It’s days like these I think I’m starting to get the hang of this sysadmin thing… :)