Once you have zeroed in on your hosting solution, there could be several steps in your deployment process, from running regression tests to spawning background services.

The key to a successful deployment process is automation. Since deploying applications involve a series of well-defined steps, it can be rightly approached as a programming problem. Once you have an automated deployment in place, you do not have to worry about deployments for fear of missing a step.

In fact, deployments should be painless and as frequent as required. For example, the Facebook team can release code to production up to twice a day. Considering Facebook's enormous user base and code base, this is an impressive feat, yet, it becomes necessary as emergency bug fixes and patches need to be deployed as soon as possible.

A good deployment process is also idempotent. In other words, even if you accidentally run the deployment tool twice, the actions should not be executed twice (or rather it should...