As web environments became more ubiquitous they also evolve and become much ‘closer’ to the heart of the business. Just few years ago sites used to be static and would change every few months. Now days more and more business units are using the web and they demand continuous and immediate changes – sometimes even few times a day.
Why the war started?
Traditionally, the responsibility to update web farms was of the IT Operations team. They are the owners of the server infrastructure and they know best how to handle all sorts of problems that may pop up (partial update of a web server, taking servers off and on a load-balancer, proper backup, etc.). In the good old days this was part of the standard IT Change Management process – something that you plan for 2 weeks in advance. Now days changes are more frequent and timely and don’t fit the Change Management process anymore. Furthermore, IT organizations that decided to allocate permanent sys-admin resources to handle the growing number of web site update requests found out that the surge is permanent and more and more dedicated resources are needed.
The option of opening the systems so that end users (even power end-users) will deploy on their own is never seriously considered because chances that anarchy will prevail in no time. End users are not disciplined to handle all the technical aspects of web content deployment, and the basic tools they use (such as FTP, Rsync, RoboCopy) don’t provide any proper support either.
The flip side of the coin are the frustrated Business people who feel the IT are unresponsive/unfriendly/careless and as usual “don’t understand who are they working for“… And its difficult not to understand them; they have important and timely tasks to complete and IT happens to be the gate keepers (and unfortunately the weakest link) at the very end of them. The boss usually does not take “it was not MY fault” so well…
War broke off! How can you put out the fire?
Modern web content deployment tools provide one excellent solution to the conundrum – they allow IT Operations to eat the cake (i.e. empower end users to deploy on their own) but keep it too (i.e. no room for anarchy whatsoever). How it is done? Divide and concur!
The concept is that Administrator is the one to define the Replication Jobs and decide on all aspects of replication (what, how, from where, to where, etc.), than Execution Rights are delegated to specific Users and Groups in the system. The End Users will log into the web content deployment system via a web portal and will be able to see only those jobs that have been specifically assigned to them. The only operation left for the End User is to launch the job as needed. The third leg of the table is the web content deployment system itself. A good quality system will provide all the automation features needed: logging, persistency, recovery, surgical precise file selection, etc.
Simple, isn’t it?!
Happy deployments
Content Deployment 