Posted by Andrew Phillips in the wee hours: February 1st, 2012
As the interface between Development and Operations, Application Release Management1 handles information that is highly relevant to your Release and Operations teams. Selecting an Application Release Automation solution that provides insight and analytics from both perspectives is thus a key component of an effective DevOps strategy.
Here, we explain how Deployit‘s Infrastructure and new Release Overview features help you achieve this goal.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: November 29th, 2011
Whether the driver is Agile, Cloud or DevOps1, or a “plain old” efficiency drive or process improvement initiative, forward-thinking organisations are currently looking for ways to improve their application release processes through automation. In an area where manual activities are still all too common, it’s unsurprising that the initial focus has been on automating the deployment execution – moving all the bits to the right places.
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.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips in the early morning: August 3rd, 2011
Across all industries, the services delivered by business applications have become an essential part of an enterprise’s customer offering. Bringing new features to market quickly is thus a critical factor in determining a company’s success.
In this post (an extended version of which is available as a whitepaper), we will outline today’s Release Management challenges and discuss the need for Release Automation.
We’ll identify key considerations for successful solutions and highlight why “Zero-Maintenance” is a critical requirement for Release Automation that provides the scalability required in an agile landscape and enables the delivery of continuous business value.
Posted by Andrew Phillips in the early morning: August 3rd, 2011
As part of the preparations for the recent 1.0.0 release of jclouds, I was tidying up the existing Tweetstore demo application as well as porting it to CloudBees’ Tomcat-based RUN@cloud platform.
A key part of the test harness for the original versions of Tweetstore that run on the Google App Engine is the neat GoogleDevServer class. Basically, it’s a clever wrapper around the KickStart class used under the covers by the GAE SDK tools that allows you to specify the SDK location, address, port and WAR file (or expanded WAR directory) to run.
Better still, it can programmatically be shut down cleanly, making it ideal for integration test runs1.
For CloudBees, I was thus looking to put together a similar RunAtCloudServer. It proved more challenging than expected…2
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Posted by Andrew Phillips around lunchtime: July 20th, 2011
Recently, I was preparing a connection checker for Deployit’s powerful remote execution framework Overthere. To make the checker, as compact as possible, I put together a jar-with-deps1 for distribution.
Tests and trial runs from the IDE worked, so I was expected the dry-run of the distribution to be a quick formality. Instead: boom!
Turns out that one of the libraries used by Overthere, TrueZIP – or indeed any code that utilizes Java’s SPI mechanism2 – doesn’t play well with the jar-with-deps idea. (more…)
Posted by Andrew Phillips late at night: June 16th, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In the previous post, we looked at how Reusable commands, Models and Conventions++ helped turn build from a “black box” process into the “just works” experience we know today.
We then shifted back to deployment and identified Develop a common model, (Re)discover vanilla and Support a “clean build” as three key steps required to achieve a similar transition.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips in the wee hours: May 21st, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In the previous post, we compared deployment to another key process in the application lifecycle – build – and asked which key developments turned it from a magical “black box” into the “just works” process it is today.
We identified Reusable commands, Models and Conventions++ as three key steps, which we’ll look into in more detail in this post. Then, we’ll shift back to deployment and ask which improvements will be essential to getting to “just works” here.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: May 3rd, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In this first post, we’ll focus on some of the changes and trends across the industry that have brought such increased business attention to the area of release, deployment and management of applications.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips around lunchtime: February 24th, 2011
Recently, I was tweaking MultiSPI to add the following class loading fallback logic:
if (threadContextLoader != null) {
loadFromContextLoader(className);
} else if (systemLoader != null) {
loadFromSystemLoader(className);
} else {
loadFromBootstrapLoader(className);
}
and realized that it’s not immediately evident how to do this in a uniform way. But actually, it’s quite simple…getting a ClassLoader object for the bootstrap loader is just a couple of lines of code.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-morning: February 13th, 2011
Implementing a Java SPI isn’t a particularly 2011 experience1. Creating a correctly-named text file in META-INF/services, making sure it is correctly packaged and remembering to keep it up to date when you refactor is sufficiently annoying and error-prone that there are at least a couple of utils that aim to make this easier.
At XebiaLabs, however, we’re not just the implementors of our plugin SPI. We also write the deployment engine that consumes these plugins. And unfortunately, there isn’t much out there to help you read, load and verify services. Hence MultiSPI.
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