How to maintain big app stacks without losing your mind

zc.buildout is a powerful build/configure/deployment tool for creating applications from multiple parts, some not python. It's perfect for sharing a development environment or deploy applications to many hosts.

This tutorial will cover basic concepts, similarity to other tools such as virtual-env, puppet etc as well as practical examples.

zc.buildout has successful been used with web applications such as Plone, django and pyramid.