Deploying applications can be hard. Especially if you're not (yet, fully) on a "modern" cloud stack, and even worse: have huge customer specific individual-software which frequently changes.
At SSI Schaefer we were confronted with a huge problem: We have multiple Eclipse RCP based applications, some of them real Rich Clients, some actually headless server applications which use the same framework (Equinox, etc.). All those applications sum up to a few GB of size, built from hundreds of bundles in a huge Workspace.
At any given installation, we need to provide the server applications, the client applications, configuration for each of them along with monitoring, process control, etc. from a single central place. The whole system should allow updates to a multi-GB software within minutes to allow frequent changes in commissioning phases - from our central servers which may be on the other side of the globe.
This is where we started a new Open Source project in our Company: "BDeploy". It is a tool which does all this and much more in a very stable, consistent and easy to use fashion.
Not only could we solve all our deployment issues, but we now also have a path to "the future", as BDeploy will act as a "bridge" to the cloud-native world for SSI Schaefer Applications in the future.