I am looking for recommendations on tools for automatic deployment of Windows Service to several machines. The tool should be able to:
– Stop/Start service
– Copy files
– Modify configuration files on each destination server according to some CSV/Excel file
Advantages: Web interface, notification via email, compression/decompression
Here are the tools I heard of, and I am starting to evaluate, but I would like to hear from people who actually applied one of these (or some other tools) in their automatic deployment process.
- Chef http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home
- ayehu AKA eyeShare http://www.ayehu.com/
- Puppet http://puppetlabs.com/
- Nolio http://www.noliosoft.com/
- Octopus Deploy http://octopusdeploy.com/
- Kwatee http://www.kwatee.net/
P.S. There is a similar question on SO, but it does not answer my question:
WCF service deployment – tools
Answering
Q: How many servers do you plan to deploy to?
A: Currently 20 servers in 2 data centers. The numbers might grow in the future
Q: How many users will be involved in designing and executing the deployment?
A: One would design the deployment, and somebody else (a single person) will execute it
Q: Does your deployment require Cross-tier synchronization?
A: I need to deploy only a single Windows Service, no database changes, no IIS or any other web tier
Q: How important are auditing and reports to you?
A: I would like the tool to be able to report whether its succeeded or not. It would be also nice to see a complete dashboard of all the deployed servers with their versions and recent changes.
You could add kwatee to your list. It’s lightweight with a web interface for configuration and CLI tools to automate the deployment process. You can handle your target-specific parameter with built-in deployment variables but there might also be a way for you to do your own parsing of CSV files and inject them. Note that you must enable either ssh or telnet/ftp on your target computers.