Automate, you must! Recently, at work, we rolled out a new version of one of our major web applications. Until recently rolling out changes was a major undertaking. Over the past few years it's evolved into a much more reliable system that takes about 11 minutes! Here is a quick chronology of the evolution of our deployment system: Pre-deployment system Believe it or not our earliest versions of this product (many years ago in a galaxy far far away...etc) had no deployment system, let alone automation. Unless you considered me or some other guy making a change and Ftping it to the live site for testing, a deployment system. These were carefree times with few users to be annoyed by the occasional bit of downtime. Also, we worked in mostly interpreted languages (ah the good old days!) Let's get a testing server! As we grew and more users were around to pay attention to our untested new "features". We decided a test server was in order. The first iterations of the test s...