The road to full deployment automation

As much as we like writing code and building cool solutions, our lines of code are worth nothing until they run in production. On the other hand, time spent putting things in production is time not spent on new features. An interesting dilemma, and one we can solve with what we love most: automation!

Automating your deployments can feel scary. After all, if you’re not there to catch production if it falls over, then it will hit the ground and shatter in a thousand pieces. But in our experience, the most successful companies deploy as often as possible.

While many roads lead to Rome, there are a couple of common borders we all have to cross to get there. In this post, we want to take you partway along one of these roads, and to take a stop at some of these common milestones that you will want to visit. Along the way, we will tell you about the way we implemented this step at one of our projects. Even without traveling all the way to a fully automatic CI/CD flow from development to production, the milestones we hit in this first part of the journey can still help any development team!

Deployable artifacts

To start with, we should ensure that our project ends up packaged