just finished working on my first real fully automated + autoscaling + distributed application environment a few weeks ago. The the definition/spec for all of i

just finished working on my first real fully automated + autoscaling + distributed application environment a few weeks ago. The the definition/spec for all of it is on source control; nothing is done manually at go-time. It gives you the same type of confidence about your application environment that you experienced for the first time when you switched to automated application deployments. the various "click the build button" workflows that are implemented so far: 1. base images for all the different server types get built/updated. any future environment updates will upgrade machines to the new images. 2. an entire new named application environment (minimum ~15 VMs) gets created (webservers, background services, cache servers, database servers, etc..), configured, and applications deployed to. creating a new environment for, e.g, performance testing is as simple saying "build: performance-test-env" 3. an entire app environment (any of them) gets updated based on any configuration changes made since the last update/create. 4. various normal application deployment automation