I have a bunch of questions about how to build and deploy large projects to production and I haven't been able to find good resources for answers. Right now I've been haphazardly checking engineering blogs and hoping someone talks about deploys, and reading http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/12/staging-servers-source-control-deploy-workflows-and-other-stuff-nobody-teaches-you/. That's a great starting point but where should I look next? Where can I learn more about building and deploying large projects?
Is there a gospel for building and deploying systems? What's a "good" duration for end-to-end deploys? How do I make sure I don't break everything? How do you swap the production code without dropping in-progress requests? What are the things I won't know that I don't know, if I've never done this before?
Thanks, Kevin