I attended today a one day training at QCon London about Continuous delivery. The session was generally interesting until the topic of treating infrastructure as software started tools such as puppet, chef ... Is this really a good idea? Points noted during the presentation: Excellent points: Everyone should be testing, and, Need to help each other out Location where binaries are stored to avoid rebuilding binaries from source is called "Artifact repository" Using the same artifacts to deploy across environments is a good practice. It allows to cross potential sources of issues out if things go wrong One should not use SNAPSHOTS in Maven dependencies With management, it is important to agree on an outcome. After that a solution can be proposed. Find the constraint you are having right now and then do the necessary to remove it. Dark Launch is a very good way to de-risk a deployment. Suggested good reads (available on the web) were: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup B