Advanced deployment strategies

So far, we have seen how you can effectively deploy an application, and despite it being a web application or an enterprise application, the deployment process is the same.

Furthermore, sometimes there is a need to just update a portion of an application due to environment settings, and despite all best practices in software life cycle management and enterprise DevOps patterns, you still have to deal with scenarios in which such practices are just not practicable.

Fortunately, JBoss provides a neat feature named deployment overlays.

Deployment overlays

Deployment overlays are ways to overlay, to cover, and to replace the content of a deployment without altering the application itself. Let's say it's a way to gently hack current modules.

First, let me explain how it works, and then we will look at an example.

Despite its name, a deployment overlay has a different life cycle. We first need to create the overlay and then we apply the overlay to an existing deployment...