Discussion on: How does deployment work at your organization?

The coolest and most frustrating thing about DevOps is there's a hundred different ways to do something. I say this in hope I won't be judged too harshly for how we do deployments.

I should first mention that we're not a company in the web app space. The company I love working for primarily creates cross-platform C++ applications that run on Linux/Windows appliances. Also, as a DevOps Engineer, my customers aren't always actual customers. More often than not, they're developers. When we deploy, we remotely update the Linux or Windows platform, then uninstall anything existing software, reboot, then install the most up to date software, license it, and verify the installation was successful.

We accomplish this primarily through Ansible playbooks that deal with the actual deployment, and use Jenkins jobs as the self-service mechanism for our developer customers. When devs want to upgrade their systems to test or do whatever, they can go to Jenkins, enter their IP and select the version to install and click 'Build'. The rest of the process is seamless to the customer, with the exception of the 'DevOps is deploying' screen we run during the deployment to let the remote user know the system is doing something.

I know we could look into Ansible Tower or FOSS alternatives, but people got used to Jenkins so I try to let that be the common interface for self-service tasks performed by our developer customers that need an automated capability.