Putting software in production can be a challenge, often the frequency of going to production is low and the amount of changes/features involved is high. This usually results in a long and painfull deployment process. The release probably contains as many changes as possible because if you do not get your change/feature in this release the next release may very well be in 6 – 12 months.

To create the illusion of being able to prevent this and have more control the deployment department is often confronted with huge, 100+ pages, deployment guides decribing the deployment process in numerous, usual manual, steps. Incidents occur in the newly deployed software. Since there were so many changes in the new release, how are we going to find out which part of the newly deployed software is causing the problem.
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After being derided as “unpure” by cloud enthusiast when the idea was first presented, we can now safely say that the hybrid cloud is here to stay. The mix of dynamic requirements within the enterprise related to government/industry regulations, security and performance require a more flexible environment than the public cloud can offer. So what does a hybrid cloud actually mean? A hybrid cloud is a composition of a private cloud and public cloud. There are two types of scaling patterns when using a hybrid cloud: vertical and horizontal.

A vertical scaling pattern is the better-known scenario. This pattern spreads different components of one application across different clouds. An example of this would be where one part of an application, typically the data, is kept private, while another part is run in the cloud, such as the web front end or calculations being made on the data.

A horizontal hybrid cloud scaling pattern, on the other hand, spreads different instances of applications across different clouds. In this scenario, enterprises develop their own applications and run them in multiple environments, some on-prem, some in the cloud. Developers run it in a test environment, testers test it in a QA environment, and users access the version that has been deployed to the production environment. Each of these environments can be in the cloud or on-prem depending on the security, performance, flexibility and scalability requirements of that environment.

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Our approach to software development has changed in the last few years. IT professionals and software developers are working more closely together than ever before. The DevOps trend also extends to an acknowledgement that automation is a key factor in reducing costs and increasing release speeds.

Striving to be cost effective is a constant for any business but the increased focus on speed of deployment is a product of the growth of the Cloud and Agile development methodology. The bottom line is – the faster new features, fixes and improvements reach the customer, the greater their satisfaction. The same principle applies in an enterprise environment – the faster the latest version of an application reaches users, the more productive they can be.

Both environments require scalability. As your product offerings grow and branch out, the delivery method must be capable of handling the changes. In the enterprise environment a large portfolio of software applications is the norm and any deployment solution must be able to scale.

Automated app deployment can reduce costs, increase speed and scale as needed, but before we take a look at the solution let’s discuss the problem.

App Deployment Nightmares

There are a lot of potential problems in deploying applications manually. Not least of which is the time it can consume for developers and IT support. Configuration is the first challenge. Where is the application stored? Which version should be installed? Where should it be installed? Where is the configuration file and how is it applied?

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Deployit provides fine-grained security settings based on roles and permissions and allows them to be configured through the CLI and in the GUI.

In this example, we’ll be setting up security roles using the GUI. The example environment has two applications, OnlineOrders and SiteSearch that are both deployed to a test server before going to production. There are two different teams developing and deploying the applications. One team can’t see the other’s team application. Moreover, developers can only deploy to the test environment. Deployers can deploy both to the test environment and to production.

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As part of testing and demonstrating our advanced deployment automation¹ platform Deployit, we at XebiaLabs use a lot of cloud and Devops tooling to be able to handle all the different types of middleware we support and build, CI and Ops tooling with which we integrate².

I was recently setting up a Vagrant³ environment to demonstrate Deployit’s Puppet module, which automatically registers new Puppet-provisioned middleware with your deployment automation platform to enable application-tier deployments to it, and ended up wrestling for quite some time with a tricky VirtualBox problem.
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As part of testing and demonstrating our advanced deployment automation¹ platform Deployit, we at XebiaLabs use a lot of cloud and Devops tooling to be able to handle all the different types of middleware we support and build, CI and Ops tooling with which we integrate².

I was recently setting up a Vagrant³ environment to demonstrate Deployit’s Puppet module, which automatically registers new Puppet-provisioned middleware with your deployment automation platform to enable application-tier deployments to it, and ended up wrestling for quite some time with a tricky VirtualBox problem.
 Read more

Most ESB example start from some HelloWorld use case, where you have to send a message to the ESB and it will print it to the console. In this post I would like to show that you can do a lot more with an ESB, for example reading and analyzing data from social media like twitter.

The example below will demonstrate how you can use JBossESB to retweet every message containing a certain hashtag. If you want you can extend the example and store all the messages to database, or keep track of those users who have posted the most amount of messages with a certain content.

Prerequisites

• JBoss AS 6.1 installed
• JBoss ESB 4.10 integrated
• Also add the twitter4j library to the JBoss library folder

Step 1) Create a scheduler using JBossESB
When you want to retweet all messages containing a certain hashtag, you need some kind of scheduler that is fired every second, minute or hour. In the jboss-esb.xml file you can do this by using a ‘schedule-provider’.

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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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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.
 Read more