Turn-key Deployment Options
Deployment is a late-stage development process that should be included from inceptions of a project.
Code deployment is just a code word for how you get your code from your local machine, or your developers’ laptop to your site. This requirement is often something that gets added to a project after the team grows past its initial founders/coders.
In the old days when we only had Jenkins to work with, and the knowledge and experience to get this set up was high, it was often left out. But that has changed, there are now vendors who offer this service.
The CEO TL;DR
As a CEO, you only care about this part of your stack because it provides you with tools to get features live quickly and safely. Having a developer log into a production AWS EC2 instance to push code to make it 'live', is a bad sign. This feature is cheap and pays off quickly.
Some Options to get started
Here are three good examples of (almost) turnkey simple deployment tools (aka CI/CD).
Github Actions - This feature was launched in 2018 and enables code build, testing and deployment with a few simple file changes to your Github repos. Getting setup with their actions take less than 30 minutes, and it has huge benefits.
First, it's free with an account. Second, it conditions your team to start using secrets to manage API keys etc. And finally, can be a good screening question for your new hires. (If they do not know about GitHub actions, then maybe they are too green to hire.
Oh, Codeship.io (now owned by CloudBees). It has been a staple for dev teams for years. This company come through Techstars in 2011, has been offering perks for 10 years. They are very very startup-friendly. Ping their support team and they help. And more importantly, they support deployments from Github to either a docker contains or directly to their build environment.
Last I heard, this was a Berlin-based startup! Killer product, very easy to configure, and free for open-source, and affordable for private repos. It uses a local `yaml` file to configure your deployment workflows.
This is not a complete list. No need to do the googling for you. :)
Tech Note
Having your deployment workflows stored in code is a huge win at SOC2 audit time. If you can show that your processes for deploying code are declarative, and tracked with version control (i.e. in Github) you are actually showing people that your company has already been complying with cyber security requirements. Basically, it's an easy win.