Towards automated deployment of built-to-order systems

Abstract

End-to-end automated application design and deployment poses a significant technical challenge. With increasing scale and complexity of IT systems and the manual handling of existing scripts and configuration files for application deployment that makes them increasingly error-prone and brittle, this problem has become more acute. Even though design tools have been used to automate system design, it is usually difficult to translate these designs to deployed systems in an automated manner due to both syntactic obstacles and the synchronization of multiple activities involved in such a deployment. We describe a generic process of automated deployment from design documents and evaluate this process for 1, 2, and 3-tier distributed applications. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.