DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

Deployment Automation

When I’m evaluating an organization to determine their level of maturity around DevOps practices, the first milestone I look for is deployment automation; that is, can the team deploy their work into a production environment at will, without manual steps? This is closely related to the practice of Continuous Deployment, which also includes practices which keep code quality high and monitor deployments for regressions automatically.

When working with the DNN Platform, teams which are interested in automating their deployments may feel stuck, because there is not an obvious out-of-the-box approach to installing updates to extensions (e.g. modules, themes, libraries, etc.). PolyDeploy is a DNN extension that, once configured, exposes an API to allow installing a collection of extensions into your DNN site automatically. Starting in DNN 10.x, PolyDeploy is included as an in-box DNN extension renamed to Bulk Install. Engage maintains both the old PolyDeploy task for Azure DevOps and the new Bulk Install Deploy Client .NET Tool.

Conclusion

Whatever tools and platforms you end up using, you don’t have to feel stuck on your journey to better software delivery and reliability. The community may be able to point you in the direction of options you weren’t aware of, or you may find that the next step in automating is creating a new tool which, ultimately, may end up benefiting the rest of the community after you’ve met the needs of your team and organization.