A Short History of Deployment Processes

The Beginning

In the beginning, there were no package managers. There were no JAR, WAR, RPM, DEB, and other package formats. Package managers typically maintain a database of software dependencies and version information to prevent software mismatches and missing prerequisites. The best we could do at that time was to zip files that form a release. More likely, we’d manually copy files from one place to another. When this practice is combined with bare-metal servers which were intended to last forever, the result was living hell. After some time, no one knew what was installed on the servers. Constant overwrites, reconfigurations, package installations, and mutable types of actions resulted in unstable, unreliable, and undocumented software running on top of countless OS patches.