posted by jbrisbin on July 26, 2010 08:12 AM

You've spent a lot of time setting up a private cloud of servers. Everything's virtualized and you have it organized by function. Your messaging VMs run on these hosts and your web servers run on those hosts. You've tested it extensively and you're happy with how everything talks to each other. The worst is over, right? Wrong. Now you have to move past the theoretical and actually use this thing in production. It's time to start deploying the applications you're building into this cloud of virtualized resources. It's time to develop some scheme to keep your applications updated when changes are made. Keep in mind, whatever mistakes you inject at this point will be multiplied by the number of machines that deploys to.

Scared yet?

Don't be! It's really not that hard. In this article, I'll introduce you to some concepts I used in developing the fairly simple system of messages and scripts that deploy artifacts into our private cloud. This won't be a technical HOWTO so much as it will be a casual dinner conversation about the pitfalls and rewards. Above all, I want to get across that having a bunch of virtual machines that do the same thing doesn't have to keep you up at night.

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