A big win for development team productivity can be automating as much of the routine tasks as possible. The scope of tasks that could be automated is practically unlimited; if it happens more than once, you might want to think about it. The reason for this is simple: deployment tasks are often repetitive and prone to error. Doing it correctly once, capturing the process and automating it prevents errors, reduces efforts, and minimizes time spent away from focusing on your application.
Fabric is a very recent tool written in Python that attempts to provide a simple framework for automating deployment activities. It allows us to automate common elements of a deployment process, including connecting to and issuing commands on servers via SSH, uploading and downloading files, and gathering input from the console when needed. Documentation and more information are available at http://docs.fabfile.org/.