(N)one click deployment

Last week I attended the AEMHub conference in London and I really loved it. Lot of nice people, interesting talks (and chats) and inspiring presentations. And Cognifide did a great job in organizing this. Thanks folks, especially to Juliette and Kimberly!

I also held a presentation called “(N)one click deployment”. It focussed to the point, that IT operation staff should not be held responsible for the automation of operation processes (for many reasons, like insufficient time, insufficient skills and sometimes even the lack of motivation). But instead, developers are by nature creators of automation, because programming is just automating steps to perform a task.

Additionally the features you might consider as natural tools for automating CQ maintenance or deployment procedures are just build blocks, not tools. When you use curl to automate such processes you have to care about error handling and reporting. Which can get pretty complicated, when you have to parse server responses to determine the right status, and your only tool is the Unix shell.

So in the end you’re better off when you use a programming language, which offers more feature than shell and makes things easier to build, test and debug. So if you are an operation guy which focusses on automating AEM deployments and maintenance tasks, don’t focus too much on handling too much external, but motivate the developers (and probably also the vendor :-)) to include more sophisticated building blocks to the application or the product itself, so your job is getting easier.

You can find my slidedeck on the offical AEMHub slideshare page.