How Deployment Manager works

Deployment Manager is designed to take packages, and deploy them to machines. When you perform a deployment, Deployment Manager works through these steps:

1. It gathers the packages to install
2. It uploads them to the remote machines they should be installed to
3. An agent (a small Windows service) on the remote machine installs them

When we say package, we really just mean a ZIP file with a small manifest describing the contents. A package consists of all of the files needed by the application (for example, executables, DLL's, configuration files, CSS files, and so on). Deployment Manager uses the NuGet file format, created by Microsoft and used by Visual Studio. For more information on how Deployment Manager uses packages, see: NuGet packages.

The remote machines are your web servers, application servers, database servers, and any other server on which you want to deploy your software. On them, you install a tiny agent process called Agent. The idea is that one Deployment Manager has many Agents.

Communication between a Deployment Manager server and an Agent is always encrypted using a trust relationship based on public/private key cryptography. That makes it secure enough to use on production machines in the cloud or in remote data centres. In fact, machines don't even have to be on the same Active Directory domain - a common scenario is to run Deployment Manager on a local machine within your enterprise, but to have it deploying software to remote machines in the cloud.

Bringing it all together is the Deployment Manager server, which consists of the web interface that users can use to define their deployments, and an orchestration service that co-ordinates the deployment process.

Thus, the three main components that make up an Deployment Manager installation are:

1. A central Deployment Manager server, with a web interface for coordinating deployments
2. An Agent service, which runs on each of the servers you plan to deploy applications to - e.g. test, staging, and production
3. A NuGet package repository containing the files you want to deploy

Installation

Now that we have the background out of the way, let's install Deployment Manager. The steps are:

1. Install the Deployment Manager server
2. Install the Agent to your target machines
3. Decide where to store your packages