[Chicago] How do you deploy?

[Tal Liron]

I've developed my own deployment container that I may present to ChiPy in
the future.

Otherwise, I have a rule of thumb: don't use deployment solutions that
themselves need deployment. Fabric and Puppet both break that rule, and I
prefer not to use them. I've used Chef in the past, and was thoroughly
frustrated when Chef itself broke.

So, I recommend (R)ex?: http://rexify.org/

It uses SSH for its transport, so it will always work, even on clean nodes.
And its Perl scripts are actually very friendly to use, no less so than the
Ruby-based tools. It has great industry support, is rock-solid and has lots
of plugins, including integration with Gearman for really big deployments
that can benefit from concurrency (that, of course, does require deploying
Gearman). Documentation is imperfect, but I recommend investing in learning
it.

Also, I am assuming you want to deploy Python: you absolutely want to use
virtualenv, and also Supervisor if you need to run multiple servers.

Finally, in terms of versioning, consider packaging in .deb or .rpm, and
managing your own repository. More learning up front, for sure, but it
makes installation/upgrades dead easy, and also safe (no orphaned files).

Another pro-tip: I strongly recommend the "configuration by script"
approach. Instead of hardcoded (or generated) configuration files that you
have to deploy to each node, have your Python (or other language) apps know
how to configure themselves upon startup according to interrogation of
their runtime environment. All cloud implementations have some sort of API
(sometimes REST-based) for that. It's more work to do this, but it means
that you never have to worry about configuration files, especially
*different* configuration files per node. You just need to restart services
in order to "reconfigure" them.

PaaS ends up costing you more in the long-run, and you may hit various
walls in terms of flexibility. Consider rolling your own solution, which
you completely own and can fine-tune.

-Tal

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Adam "Cezar" Jenkins <
emperorcezar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wondering what most people are doing. Seems to me deployments are
> currently in a few groupings.
>
> - Fabric to personal server or AWS
> - By hand to personal server or AWS
> - Something custom, like a custom git-hook
> - Pushing to Heroku or another PaaS like OpenShift, Stackato etc.
>
> What is your prefered method?
>
> Mine personally is Heroku for most things. I prefer a PaaS if I can get
> away with it. If I need custom, I prefer Chef (maybe Ansible/Salt in the
> future). Custom is going to be much easier now that EC2 has Chef support
> built in.
>
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> Chicago at python.org
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>
>
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