Building and deployment

Building and deployment are the steps to create the deployment unit from the source code and put it in the target runtime environment. The developer executes most of the steps in the IDE. However, with CI principles, an integration server does the compilation, automated test case execution, building the deployment unit, and deploying it in a target runtime.

In a cloud environment, the deployable unit is deployed on a virtual environment such as a virtual machine (VM) or in a container. As part of the deployment, it is important to include the necessary runtimes and dependencies as part of the build process itself. This is different from the traditional process of putting a .war or .ear in an application server running in each environment. Including all dependencies in the deployable unit makes it complete and consistent as it moves across the various environments. This reduces the chances of errors where the dependencies on server does not match with those on the local machine of the developer.