Over the past month, my colleague Kurtis and I have been engineering a fully automated deployment system for all of our projects at work. This system was created to remove the painful deployment process from our development environment. This article discusses the requirements that we had for our deployment system. I eventually hope to discuss the entire thing, how we built it, and what revisions we make.

Why Deploying Can Be Painful

Most programmers hate deploying code. I certainly did until this past year. Deploying code is (often times) much harder than writing the code itself. Deploying requires a great deal of knowledge: OS configuration and setup, cloud provider APIs or physical server installation quirks, numerous software components, system monitoring, access lists, and a lot of other things.

It's a pain.

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