On the Zend blog there's a new post that looks at one of the major steps when you start to think about automation in the deployment of your application - continuous delivery.

For many, the process of manually developing and deploying software to production is archaic at best. Even in highly automated software development environments, at least one developer (although often more) typically manages modifications to code and software products, and the ramifications of these modifications can be extensive or unknown. [...] The emerging process for developing and deploying applications of high quality is one that is highly automated, executing continuously, and covers the entire development process, from modifying code through testing to deployment. Automation provides analysis that flags code for improvement and executes full regression tests every time a modification is made.

[...] This process is called continuous delivery, and automation is a key component of a mature continuous delivery process, which includes: continuous integration, infrastructure automation, and release automation.

After the introduction, they get into some of the basic concepts of continuous delivery and what kinds of steps can make up the full process. From there they get into some of the benefits of its introduction including lower staffing costs and enhanced teamwork. They balance this out with two barriers that could prevent adoption - the initial cost and the organization culture considerations that would need to change.