[heymishy]

whats your current deployment strategy, series of powershell scripts or something chef/puppet based? We had a powershell based setup and my previous shop but hardest part was maintaing and deploying different databases to make the tests relevant.

How do you think docker containers helps (as Im not sure it would have helped in my previous situation - too many other base issues to deal with first)

[amarraja]

Git -> Teamcity -> Octopus -> Server.

We also use database migrations to keep everything updated. It's a simple process but works well.

Code and deployment is all fine, it's maintainaing server configurations across environments (IIS, permissions, ports, ips, firewalls to name a few, a different issue every time and on every env!). Likely this is more to do with having completely seperated operations and development, however bring able to control the apps environment will allow us to deliver more, faster.

[wluu]

If I understand correctly, I think Powershell DSC (Desired State Configuration) might be able to do what you need with regards to windows server config.

See: - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn249918.aspx - http://powershell.org/wp/2013/10/02/building-a-desired-state...

[amarraja]

Looks interesting, but our problem is more a separation of operation and development teams. It's not ideal, but we're a dev house and clients like to keep their operations in house for a number of reason (PCI compliance is one of them).

From my point of view OS configuration for app level concerns (web servers, services etc), should sit in the development realm, ready for operational teams to distribute and monitor.

Scripting systems does help, but it is not the final solution when you have mixed, varying talent teams. As a side note, every time I have tried scripting Windows systems I get an extra gray hair!

[deadweight3]

Does anyone know of a reasonable deployment management solution in open source for .Net? Octopus is perfect, but with my limited budget of $0, it's a tad costly.

[berdario]

Ansible recently started to support Windows: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_windows.html

I haven't used it yet on Windows, but it's good enough on unixes... And it's quite lightweight and easy to setup (it relies on python2 on *nix and powershell on windows)

[SEJeff]

It is a linux tool primarily, but I'm one of the comaintainers of the saltstack salt config management tool. It supports windows pretty well and we have plenty of users who use it on windows for their enterprise server deployments.

It can be used to replace deployment tools like capistrano and fabric on Linux. No reason it can't do the same on Windows if you grok it enough to use it.

http://www.saltstack.com/community/

[mythz]

You can use WebDeploy, here's a walkthrough for publishing ASP.NET Web Applications to AWS with WebDeploy which can also be automated with a Grunt task: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Simple-Dep...

[smurfpandey]

You can try Web Deploy http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/web-deploy

[MadhanA]

Hey, this is Madhan from Azure team.

Great to see this conversation about Octopus. Stay tuned for news about Octopus and Azure.

[myefforts]

Octopus has a Community Edition which costs $0. Limited to 5 projects to up to 10 Tentacles and to 5 users

[heymishy]

ah nice, we looked into octopus at the time but was still early development days and was too much of a risk, otherwise pretty much the same stack. I can see what you mean re server config, would be a lot easier with docker than what i was hacking about with vagrant.

thanks for the info!

[amarraja]

We are running a fairly old version (two years old, haven't upgraded yet) and I would wholeheartedly recommend it!

[serve_yay]

Octopus is excellent, probably my favorite part of when I previously worked in a .NET shop.