Why are there so many deployment systems?

There is a bewildering abundance of options regarding the installation of packages and configuring them on actual servers, not to mention all the ways to deploy client-side code.

First, let's examine the basics of the problem we are trying to solve.

We have a typical enterprise application, with a number of different high-level components. We don't need to make the scenario overly complex to start reasoning about the challenges that exist in this space.

In our scenario, we have the following:

  • A web server
  • An application server
  • A database server

If we only have a single physical server and these few components to worry about that get released once a year or so, we can install the software manually ...

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