Application deployment with Puppet

for unattended network installations we use opsi, it boots off pxe and installs the OS using unattend(ed). Once the OS is loaded, then wpkg takes over and configures the rest according to the profiles you specify. Both projects are open source and actively maintained.

For MS SQL server 2005, copy the cdroms to a network share; you can edit the file template.ini on on cdrom 1 and run

setup.exe /settings /qn

more info: http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/04/10/sql-server-2005-silent-installation-unattended-installation/

Of course, for the newer version they had to change something, the ini file is now ConfigurationFile.ini (msdn)

IIS can also be fully scripted with pkgmgr. Here you will see how, scroll down to 'unattended installation' on the site.

To Microsoft's credit, there are now very few installers that cannot be automated, and most are not from Microsoft themselves.

We use puppet, but we don't use it for our application deployments. As you said, you could package your software into debs or rpms, configure your private repository everywhere, and use puppet to control versions, but you're still at the mercy of waiting for the next 30 minute refresh on all your servers.

What I would do (and this is close to what we do, but we use rails so there's no compile step):

• Use puppet to configure everything on the server except the application itself. Dependencies, web servers, users, paths, etc.
• Have your automated build server (bamboo, hudson, cruise control, etc.) put the compiled artefacts in a repository manager like Nexus.
• Use capistrano to push build to your servers.

Chef might have more real-time push capabilities; I'm not very familiar with it.