[Catalyst] OT: managing multiple environments (was: keeping multiple Catalyst applications up to date)

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Allen S. Rout <asr at ufl.edu> [2006-06-12 21:20]:
> >> On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:00:15 +0200, "A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis at gmx.de> said:
> > Just note that the more environments there are, the more
> > porting from one to the other you'll be doing. The friction
> > is just about bearable with 3 environments. Beyond that, you
> > waste significant amounts of effort on managing the setup.
> 
> I'd suggest that it ought to be technically effortless to
> transfer an app from region A to region B.  Yeah, you need to
> write some code to do it, but the -operational- complexity
> shouldn't scale with the number of regions.  How much effort
> does it take to deploy a new copy of a properly built WAR or
> EAR?  
> 
> Knowing your app well enough to do this is also useful when you
> want to be sure you've backed it up.

I agree with all that; but it’s only true in the forward
direction (devel --> test --> prod). Unfortunately, you’ll often
also have to port changes the other direction between devel and
test. After all, that’s a major reason to have a test environment
in the first place: so you can test specific fixes for problems
found in the production code, and then push them out.

In version control parlance, test+production run a branch of a
known-good snapshot, and the devel env runs the trunk. What I’m
saying is that you will be porting changes between that branch
and the trunk, which can’t be automated, but eats up effort.

As you add more environments, you get more snapshot branches, and
correspondingly more change-porting friction.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>