Enterprises are increasingly aware that they need to accelerate the application release process by automating application deployments. However, It is often a challenge to understand what is the best tooling to accelerate your application release process that also fits into your evolving DevOps and/or Application Release Lifecycle and your existing infrastructure ecosystem.

We recently surveyed a select group of large Enterprises, across a range of verticals. We asked, what are the questions and concerns that come to mind when you consider automating the deployments for your Enterprise?

This webinar will address the trending questions that were returned to us that specifically relate to deployment automation tooling and its placement in complex, heterogeneous enterprise ecosystems.

Here are some of the questions that we will address:

• What is Deployment Automation and what are my tooling options?
• How can Application Release Automation improve my Application Release Process?
• How does Deployit automate workflow generation?
• Where does Deployment Automation fit within my existing Agile Strategy?
• How can Deployment Automation accelerate my Continuous Delivery Lifecycle?
• How can I prevent my scripts workflow definitions from becoming a maintenance bottleneck?
• Can I automate deployments to middleware and cloud environments, all from one platform?

By answering these questions, we hope to clarify exactly how the Enterprise can optimize their Agile Application Release Lifecycle with Deployment Automation tooling that Fits.

Guest Post: Bob Aiello, Author of Configuration Management Best Practices, Practical Methods that Work in the Real World

Ergonomics is the study of making work environments more efficient, usually for the purpose of avoiding injuries and improving productivity. Another important aspect of ergonomics is avoiding mistakes. When looking at the controls in the cockpit of a plane, the untrained observer can easily see that engineers have designed the controls to greatly minimize the possibility of a human error. So it is puzzling to observe that some software engineers create confusing, incomplete and contradictory installation instructions that often lead to costly mistakes and rework. Technology professionals pride themselves on being smart and creative. I can recall many conversations where my colleagues tried to impress each other with their ability to handle complex concepts that others could not possibly follow. I am not like that. I prefer to create processes and software automation that ensures that a junior software engineer could implement the release even at 2 am (half sleepy) after drinking a couple of beers. Building in such user-friendliness requires some creative software ergonomics.

Some computer languages are rather confusing. Many Perl programmers make use of complex (powerful) regular expressions that can manipulate and process large amounts of data. But then again, trying to read (and understand) some Perl regular expressions is almost impossible. I am not attacking (or against the use of) Perl, although I will admit my own bias in favor of Ruby as a scripting language. I am not alone in this regard as many deployment engineers utilize, and even some deployment frameworks are being written in, Ruby. A deployment framework is a set of tools and processes designed to help manage the entire deployment process. This often includes taking the existing deployment scripts and placing them into the deployment frameworks, usually enjoying the features of a dashboard showing the status of each step of the release.

This is where deployment frameworks and ergonomics can share some synergy. Build, package and deployment automation should be created with a focus on ergonomics. This means that your procedures, including scripts, should be easy to use and resistant to the errors frequently caused during human interaction. That sounds simple, but how specifically does one implement ergonomics in a script? I write my scripts to including testing (often called verification and validation) into each step. This approach can help the operator verify that the correct results are being achieved. Now I might just loose some of my gunslinger reputation by making my scripts easy to use, but this focus on clarity also means that we are able to release code more often and be completely error-free-. Another tip is to allow the available tools to do the work for you. Some Deployment frameworks have the built in intelligence to work with application servers (e.g. WebSphere, WebLogic, Jboss and Tomcat). A few even sport advanced features such as algorithmic based release automation. Do remember that this is an iterative process and may take you a few release cycles before your scripts operate without any required human intervention. In fact, in the beginning you should have specific places for your operator to pause, read the messages on the screen and then press enter when they are confident that the script is working correctly.

Using the concepts learned from ergonomics will help you implement deployment automation that is fast, reliable and completely error-free!

In this guest post, Mark van Holsteijn, Principal Consultant with one of XebiaLabs’ implementation partners, explains how integrating Deployit with enterprise open source middleware and provisioning solutions including JBoss and Puppet delivers a fully automated on-demand Java Application Platform.

The government customer was looking to quickly move away from an expensive, hard-to-manage monolithic stack to a cost-efficient virtual platform based on proven technologies and support reliable, automated configuration, provisioning, deployment and monitoring.

the application release component and thus interface to continuous delivery, plays a central role in the new platform’s automation chain, reducing the number of experts supporting deployments and preventing configuration errors.

Technical details of the integration will be outlined in the next blog in this mini-series. Coming soon!

Here, we explain how Deployit's Infrastructure and new Release Overview features help you achieve this goal.

Continuous Delivery & the Release Perspective

In today's highly competitive economic environment, the need to bring new features to market quickly, flexibly and reliably is paramount - a goal that is ultimately the aim of the main IT trends Cloud, Agile and DevOps.

Continuous Delivery - extending Continuous Integration to automatically transition applications down the Dev-Test-Acc-Prod delivery pipeline - is a key component of this strategy. In order to be able to effectively implement this, your ARA solution needs to allow your developers - or, in larger organisations, release or DevOps teams, to quickly and efficiently answer questions such as:

• How far is MyApplication down the road to Production?
• When will MyApplication take the next step down the road?
• What do I still need to do before that next step can be taken²?

Ideally, this dashboard would also allow you to plan MyApplication's next step and calculate the estimated go-live data, perhaps even based on an analysis of previews versions of MyApplication.

(Virtual) Environment Management & the Operations Perspective

From an Operations point of view, an individual application is only a small part of the picture. Across your Dev-Test-Acc-Prod landscape, you will need to track all applications vying for these environments, to manage potentially conflicting resource requests, plan environment maintenance activities and the like.

Since these environments are often owned and managed by different teams and certainly have varying service levels, you will also want to limit your view to one or a subset of these environments at a time.

Your Operations or DevOps teams need to know:

• Which application versions are currently deployed to my environment(s), or were deployed at a certain point in time?
• Which components do these applications consist of? On which middleware and infrastructure systems are these components deployed?
• What are the current values of any properties or settings for these components? Which environment-specific customizations have been applied?

Cloud and the on-demand environments it enables will eventually replace the rigid Dev-Test-Acc-Prod distinction³. Nevertheless, the ability to present an environment-centric view will still be required, since virtual environments will still be owned by different groups or teams. Indeed, such a perspective will be even more important if you want to effectively combat "virtual sprawl".

While the coming generations of "true" cloud architectures will hopefully reduce the shared resource conflicts that greatly complicate much of today's Dev-Test-Acc-Prod management, databases, legacy systems and external payment providers are not likely to disappear anytime soon.

In fact, Facebook, Twitter and other social elements of your future business services may even increase the number of shared resources you need to manage!

Incorporating ARA Data in the Service Delivery Picture

Whilst your ARA solution should be your "go-to" platform for answers about how your applications and environments relate, it is equally important to consider when this data might be more effectively embedded in a broader service delivery picture.

For example, your ARA platform is not a good candidate for providing a release calendar, since it is not aware of much of the information that is relevant in this context, such as CAB⁴ meeting schedules, business sign-off dates or operational maintenance windows.

It is thus important to ensure that your ARA solution can make its data accessible via APIs such as RSS feeds, iCal calendars and other APIs, to enable effective integrations with the rest of your service delivery tooling.

Conclusion

The right Application Release Automation platform gives your Delivery and Operations teams fast, accurate insight into your application environments and delivery pipeline.

Choosing a solution like Deployit with focused Operations and Delivery overviews as well as open APIs for easy integration into your overall Service Delivery dashboards and reports greatly enhances the accessibility and effectiveness of your application release management.

What early adopters have learnt is that, at the enterprise scale, automating release execution quickly introduces a new bottleneck in today's dynamic IT environments: continuous management of the deployment plan definition. A new generation of application release automation (ARA) tooling avoids this pitfall by leveraging intelligence to automate deployment planning as well as execution.

The State of ARA

Given how strongly our IT industry is dedicated to the automation of processes, it is nothing short of amazing how much of the deployment of our own solutions depends on manual actions coordinated more or less effectively between large groups of people.
Indeed, a recent analyst report noted that the majority of large enterprises were still relying on manual application release processes or on in-house scripting understood by only a small number of specialists, operated as a black box that - hopefully - will do its job and will most likely necessitate a painful troubleshooting session if it doesn't.

With key IT trends such as Agile, Cloud and DevOps dramatically ramping up the frequency of application releases in order to increase responsiveness to business needs and provide more and better services to customers, it's clear that this situation cannot continue.

Thinking of today's common release processes, it is also hardly surprising that the initial drive has been to automate the actual rollout of the application itself: copying the files to the target machines, restarting the servers, running the SQL against the DB etc. Using a defined workflow to organise these activities makes lots of sense: fewer failures, no more missing steps or steps executed in the wrong order, no more typos, better visualization etc.

Lessons from the First Generation

Ironically, using one of these first generation ARA tools at an enterprise scale quickly made it obvious to early adopters how much effort is required to maintain the substantial number of workflow definitions that quickly accumulate to support full deployments, partial upgrades, rollbacks, environment scale-outs etc. across an enterprise application portfolio.

Of course, this is not a new challenge: ask anyone who has had to update 100 build job definitions in a continuous integration tool to change a compilation parameter, or 100 test plans in an automated testing setup to accommodate a different target browser, just how time-consuming and error-prone this type of maintenance is.

It's not as though these modifications are unique per process. They tend to be systematic changes that reflect changes to the overall deployment strategy and/or context. The issue is that these first-generation tools, where all the deployment intelligence is stored in the power user's brain, simply do not have enough internal knowledge of the structure of deployment to assist effectively.

The Next Level of Application Release Automation

A new generation of Application Release Automation includes this intelligence. These advanced tools² no longer require hand-holding by your power users every step of the way, and encode knowledge of deployment best practices and strategies to automate the planning and execution of deployments.³

No pre-provided strategy can be a 100% fit in an enterprise environment, so the strategies must be configurable, of course. Once your power users have fine-tuned them, however, all the individual deployment plans - initial installations, full and partial upgrades, downgrades, undeployments, scale-outs etc...easily hundreds across an application portfolio - are automatically tailored to your scenario.

This becomes even more efficient the fewer deployment strategies are in play, so these tools also motivate and reward increased standardisation of deployment procedures, in itself a valuable business goal. In fact, with a suitable interface and integrations into the development pipeline you essentially have an enterprise Platform as a Service, potentially on a private or hybrid cloud.

Conclusions

With adoption of Application Release Automation rapidly on the increase, a new generation of solutions are appearing that automate deployment planning as well as execution.
Based on the challenges experienced in scaling the first generation of ARA tools to enterprise levels, these next generation solutions are designed to eliminate "continuous expert hand-holding", promote standardisation and allow organisations to create a "software factory" that continuously delivers business value.

Kadaster is a major real estate and financial services entity in the Netherlands and their online presence drives their business. As a government agency Kadaster acts as a trusted source for important data, including the Geo data for the entire country. “We rely on the internet to reach our public. Pushing our online applications out to the public faster is critical for both our business and IT strategy for 2012 and 2013," says Kadaster.

JBoss is the preferred middleware for Kardaster deployments and the IT team attempted to optimize delivery to JBoss with the JBoss Operations Network. However, Kadaster needed more than just an automation tool, they needed an automation platform that offered a User Friendly UI, optimized reporting and features focused on specifically accelerating the deployment process. "We were impressed with Deployit's slick UI, robust reporting and algorithm-based acceleration features. Also, very important to our team was the confidence that we could easily plug in and plug out this solution and potentially let it evolve with our longterm strategy. Deployit met each one of our needs," continues Kadaster.

Powered by Deployit, your Release team can automatically deploy applications across one comprehensive deployment platform. The team can stay aligned with the lifecycle of each release with access to robust release reporting that reports across all major middleware and cloud environments. The team can enjoy critical release lifecycle transparency with slick role-based user access to the platform. All Deployit features are built on a robust deployment engine that automatically calculates deployment steps, increasing speed and efficiency and the platform boasts a user-friendly UI.   An excellent team, backed by a cutting edge release automation tool can guarantee that you release applications on time, every time for 2012.

Highlighted Feature: Release Authorization

Among the most influential features in Deployit’s newest release is the Release Authorization feature. It is now possible to declare conditions that must be met before a deployment package is deployed to a particular environment. This adds another element of control for the Deployit user and ensures accurate and auditable activity at every stage of the deployment cycle.

XebiaLabs teams up with Cachet Software Solutions to bring excellence in Deployment Automation to the UK and Irish markets.  Cachet Software Solutions focuses on delivering “Best of Breed” ITIL/ITSM solutions to mid to large UK businesses.

“We at Cachet Software have been combing the market for a leading Application Release Automation (ARA) solution for some time now. Our customers often ask us for such a solution. We are delighted to have discovered XebiaLabs and we find Deployit a truly unique approach with its intelligent algorithmic approach to deployment. Most everything else we looked at used workflows and that is not what our customers want. The fact that Deployit was chosen by a such a large organisation such as AirFrance-KLM also gives us full confidence that we are bringing the right ARA solution to the UK and Irish marketplace,” says Stuart Kenely, Managing Director of Cachet Solutions.

http://cachet-software.com/default.aspx

About Cachet Software Solutions Ltd
Cachet's focus is to bring leading international software into the UK. These point solutions are "best of breed" and offer compelling Return on Investment (ROI). Cachet's portfolio works with industry standards such as ITIL and compliments the technology of Business Systems Management providers including HP, BMC, NetIQ and Computer Associates. Cachet software powers IT savings and reduces operational risk by:

• Improving IT Service Levels with reduced headcount;
• Reducing the IT Operational cost of 'keeping the lights on'
• Reducing problem identification time;
• Reducing repair time (MTTR) freeing funds for business impacting projects.

This is a guest blog post by Vincent Partington, CTO and Co-founder of XebiaLabs. Vincent saw a need to standardize deployment automation that gave way to a the startup – XebiaLabs – makers of Deployit.

Over the past five to ten years, continuous integration has become a no-brainer for every medium to large scale software development project. It’s hard to imagine going back to not having every commit (or push) automatically trigger a build and a test run of the code. That test run would have surely included unit tests, but setting it up to also run integration tests used to be difficult. You would have needed to automatically deploy the application to the target middleware environment and then run the integration tests against that environment.

What is Deployit?

Deployit offers the Enterprise one deployment automation platform to optimize the release of applications both to major middleware environments like IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, and Liferay, as well as to cloud environments such as VMware, Red Hat, and IBM.

How does it work with Bamboo?

With Bamboo, you can define new tasks in a plugin. These tasks can be added to a job that defines what happens when a build is triggered. To take care of the deployment automation, we use Deployit, an application release automation platform that can deploy to many different middleware systems and databases. We then use the Bamboo Deployit plugin to take care of the integration between the Bamboo and Deployit.

The Deployit plugin for Bamboo adds the enterprise-scale deployment capabilities of XebiaLabs Deployit to Bamboo. By adding automated deployment to your continuous integration setup to speed up your development process, this plugin allows you to take the first step towards continuous deployment and continuous delivery. Instead of deployment congesting your development process, it will become an integrated part of it. You can test your application on the target platform as soon as possible and find any platform incompatibility and deployment issues early on. When it’s time to deploy to the production environment, your deployment will be quick and reliable.

After installing the Bamboo Deployit plugin, you can add the following tasks to any Bamboo job:

• Import a deployment package in Deployit
• Deploy/Undeploy an application with Deployit

The most basic task is the import task. Add it to the build job of a project that delivers a DAR file (the Deployit “deployment archive” format that includes all the artifacts and configurations that are part of an application; you can use the Maven Deployit plugin to create DAR files) to automatically import that deployment package into Deployit. Take it one step further by adding the deploy task to your job to automatically deploy to a test environment. Then, add another task to test your application on that environment, e.g. by using JMeter or another functional testing tool. Of course, nothing is stopping you from deploying to the production environment instead of the test environment! Since you might not want every code change to trigger a deployment to the production environment, you can set up a separate Bamboo job that runs according to whatever schedule you want to run your continuous deployment with Bamboo and Deployit!

Check out how the two tools work together:

Want to learn more about the integration?

Come join Atlassian and XebiaLabs for a webinar on November 18, 2012 at 9AM PST (12PM EST). We will talk about how Bamboo and Deployit can get you one step closer to continuous deployment.

Try it out

Download the XebiaLabs Deployit Task(s) from the Atlassian plugin exchange.

New to Bamboo?

Download Bamboo to get started with a free 30-day trial.

• Tag-based Deployments: Deployit now automatically maps configuration items in your deployment packages to middleware in your environment.
• Control Tasks: Deployit is equipped with Control Tasks, allowing privileged users to troubleshoot middleware problems by starting, stopping or restarting middleware, directly from the Deployit UI.
• Webserver plugin: Deployit allows static content to be deployed to directly to webservers.

Deployit offers the Enterprise one deployment automation platform to optimize the release of applications to all major middleware environments (IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, Liferay) and to cloud environments (VMware, Red Hat & IBM).

Deployit is the proven fastest and most reliable way to deliver online applications.

Don't forget that you can cross reference your deployment paths to multiple environments with Deployit's builtin reporting. This feature enables accurate auditing and comprehensive deployment planning and analysis in hetrogeneous eco-systems.