Genuine question (since I'm doing the same with AWS right now) -- I wrote a script which makes an API call to Amazon to find the name of each of my instances, then SSH's into them automatically to do the equivalent of a git clone or update.

Seems to work so far -- any reason why I might want to be using a more advanced tool instead?

If it works for you for now then no real need to change it. A proper deployment tool usually makes it easier to deploy apps of different types and languages using a consistent set of tools.

What I do when working with SSH'ing to AWS instances is to give them a readable name (like nginx-1, nginx-2) tag, and then place those names as hostnames in my /etc/hosts, so I can then just run ssh nginx-1. I use a script around https://github.com/bjeanes/ghost to automate this.

The script looks nice, though if you don't want to have to use sudo to update /etc/hosts you can also just add entries in ~/.ssh/config. Downsides are that it only works for ssh-based activities.

Over time, you will add features to that script and it'll grow and eventually become 'a more advanced tool'. Everything starts from somewhere.

We use a slightly modified version of deploy from visionmedia (https://github.com/visionmedia/deploy). Shell script, and works very well for us.

Of course, when doing releases that affect the database schema, we still have to login to the servers.

I generally use a node script (sometimes a CLI script like [1]) with the ssh2 module [2] for most deployment tasks.

[1] https://gist.github.com/4281277 [2] https://github.com/mscdex/ssh2