Active and Staging Build Deployment

For enterprise applications, deploying and managing the process of activation and validation can be challenging.

Ant build process helps the teams in achieving this without much hassle.

Usually the build folders are constructed as Staging and Active for reference. These folders in turn link to CodeBaseA (points to staging) and CodeBaseB (points to active)

The new build that is being constructed for release is built and moved to CodeBaseA folder and previous active codebaseB folder remains intact.

Once the new build is copied to codebaseA, the logical link for active application code base is flipped to CodeBaseA and the staging link is flipped to CodeBaseB.

If the new build validation is successful, the flipped links remain in the same manner. If the build validation fails for any reason, the logical links will be flipped again. In this second flip process, CodeBaseB (old functional build) becomes active build and CodeBaseA(new build) becomes staging build.