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" Packages are, of course, a legitimate way to push out changes but the downside of deploying with packages is that it takes time to build them and upload them"

• calpaterson 14y ago
  I find it interesting that this comment has been given some points, and it's actually the draft of the comment I was trying to write on my phone, but gave up on (Hacker News doesn't work very well on my phone). Here's what I meant to say: Packages do take time to build, but your CI server should be doing that. For most kinds of deployments, you can rely on unix's copy-on-write filesystem by installing the package and then restarting you process manager (ie: supervisor or apache). This means your program is only down between restarts (assuming you have no migrations to apply). The outage due to a deployment is then typically a couple of seconds, assuming your program is quick to start up. This is a sufficiently short downtime period for many situations. There are lots of additional benefits with using packages, especially native ones, like dpkg/deb. You can add specific dependencies onto the package (for example python 2.7), which will be checked at install time. Multiple language programs are often handled better. The program is easily un-installable. If your CI server is building the package, you can download it for manual testing (for example, for UAT).