Groceries and Software

When you buy groceries from a grocery store, one of the things that they do for you is pack your groceries into plastic bags so you can take them home.  (OK, some grocery stores don't do that, but they will charge you a couple of pennies to give you a plastic bag so that you can do it yourself.)  When they pack the plastic bag they have certain, spoken and unspoken, rules.  For instance, you don't put a pound ... err, kilo... of hamburger in the same bag as fruits and veggies unless one of them is wrapped in an additional plastic bag.  You don't put a bag of potato chips at the bottom of the bag and potatoes on top of them and eggs are packed flat.

When creating a deployment for DeCo, think of ZIP files as being the similar to plastic bags from the grocery store.  Here are a few simple rules that you can follow to fill those bags:

• Create a ZIP file for each item type that you are migrating.  For instance, if you are migrating a web components and COM+ components, create two zip files, one for each.
• In each ZIP file put all of the pieces necessary to do the work for that type of deployment.  If it is a web zip file, include the MSI, any config files and even the documentation. 

The rules are really simple, but make life much easier for everyone.  For instance, by using ZIP files instead of a list of separate files, you reduce the number of times you need to attach a file to the request and you reduce the amount of space needed on the back end to store the files.  We current have over 9760 files that we are tracking from over 6800 deployments and these files take up over 19,680,000,000 bytes.  While some of those files are compressed, not all of them are. 

By using ZIP files you can help us keep a handle on the storage requirements for DeCo as well as making it easier for the Deployment Analyst or DBA to get all of the files they need for the deployment in one simple package.