Recently, Andrew Phillips, VP of Product Management at XebiaLabs, and I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Vizard, tech journalist for IT Business Edge. We had a great conversation about automating application deployments and Mike’s article provides a nice look into our discussion.

In the last paragraph, he brings up an interesting point, saying “there is going to be a lot of grumbling about having to adapt to some alien vendor's approach to IT workflow.” Unfortunately, this is still an opinion we commonly see in the deployment world, and one we will need to work hard to overturn. Andrew noted that we want to get people to the point where they don’t see it as “[adapting] to some alien vendor's approach to IT workflow,” but rather getting the benefits of industry best practices.

Of course, there are also situations in which there are legitimate reasons for deviating from this best practice. We often hear that change is too expensive and risky, or companies are too attached to their legacy investments. In these kinds of situations, we want to give people the opportunity to diverge from best practice and get the system to do what they need. 

However, it’s important to note that there is a definite trade-off here. Looking beyond any initial transition cost, companies employing outside deployment solutions benefit from the ease-of-use and peace-of-mind right out-of-the-box. However, for companies wanting to create their own in-house solution, they have the convenience of implementing a custom process, but will incur far more maintenance in the long run.

Issues around deployment solutions often result from a lack of industry standards. We’ve built our solution Deployit as a response to this absence. While we recognize it’s often difficult for companies to abandon their own solutions, Deployit still allows companies to work with their middleware of choice, supporting all leading solutions. And with the open plugin API, we offer both customers ways to tweak our in-built best practices as well as development partners ways to create new plugins to support even more middleware solutions out-of-the-box.

That being said, we’re very much a believer of accepted, open industry standards. If such a standard for deployment were to emerge, we would definitely embrace it. For now, the challenge remains getting companies to accept outside solutions for deployment automation to keep up with best practices.

Tags: best practices, deployment automation, IT workflow
Filed under Deployment, General, Middleware, Process, Tools, Xebia Labs | 1 Comment »