Some Benefits of Deployment
Deployment techniques were intended to support the installation of software in a once-and-for-all fashion. Things are changing because devices are increasingly connecting to each other, and deployment is becoming a kind of established service, in which software is released more often, maintained, customized, and even billed over the network. Deployment can be used as a marketing instrument, as a means to lower development costs, or as a way to add value and services to the software being deployed.
The lifecycle shown in Figure 1 is not realistic when it comes to the details of today's software deployment technology. We will now introduce a useful abstraction, general to the kinds of software deployment that comprise Figure 1.