Not only are the activities different, different people are responsible. While, depending upon the organization, a release manager or project manager is responsible for the release management process, the actual deployment will be carried out by a system or application administrator.
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Because application deployment is a complex process which tends to be unreliable and costly if handled manually, there is more and more pressure on companies to look at deployment automation product such as XL Deploy. That also explains why release management tools such as ThoughtWorks Go and Rational Build Forge are now being marketed as supporting deployment. But if you look closer at what they actually support, it boils down to just invoking a deployment script. And that is not what deployment automation is really about. It's about installing applications, configuring resources and restarting servers!
But this is not necessarily a bad thing: I would also not expect a release management system to include a build automation system because a release manager is not responsible for actually building the source code. I'd rather use Ant, Maven, or Gradle. In a similar vein, I'd rather have the release management system invoke a proper deployment automation system to perform the actual deployment.
That way, each tool can focus on the process it wants to support and provide the right feature set for the right target group. Release management system for release managers, build systems for developers, and deployment automation systems for system and application administrators.
Vincent Partington is the CTO of XebiaLabs. Vincent founded XebiaLabs and is the driver of technology planning, strategic direction, and strategic partnerships for the company. Vincent ensures the company continues to lead the field in engineering and innovative technologies.