Posted by Adé Mochtar mid-afternoon: December 29th, 2011
2011 has been an interesting year for cloud computing. Traditionally, cloud computing can be divided into three categories:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
While SaaS has been around for some time (Salesforce.com started in 1999!), we are seeing an increase in adoption of IaaS and some heavy development in the PaaS world.
Now that 2011 is coming to an end, this is also the time for lists. So here are my 3 top 3’s of cloud computing.
Posted by Mark van Holsteijn in the early afternoon: December 14th, 2011
How do you setup a environment that support the continuous deliver of enterprise Java applications? How do you manage the large number of machines that are involved? How do you enable self-service, continuous delivery of applications onto the platform?
In this blog post we will give a description of an open source Java Application Platform as a Service that we created for our customer, using VMware, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Apache WebServer, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Operations Network, Puppet, Deployit, F5 Load Balancer and a Layer7 SecureSpan gateway.
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 Vincent Partington in the early morning: August 15th, 2011
A few months ago I blogged about the integration between Deployit and IBM WebSphere CloudBurst (since renamed to IBM Workload Deployer). While that article gave an overview of the integration and included some nice screenshots, it did not really go into the details. Now is the time to explore the implementation of this integration..
Workload Deployer V3 and Deployit from XebiaLabs both “deploy” things, but they deploy different things. Deployit deploys application artifacts and resources, such as EAR files and data sources, to middleware systems like IBM WebSphere Application Server (but also HTML to web servers, IBM WebSphere MQ configurations to queue managers, and so on). IBM Workload Deployer, on the other hand, deploys patterns (or topologies) of virtual images to hypervisors — but not just any kind of virtual images. IBM Workload Deployer is especially geared toward deploying middleware topologies.
IBM Workload Deployer V3 is an updated and enhanced version of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, renamed to reflect the expanded scope of workloads it can deploy, which are no longer limited to only WebSphere workloads. The content for this article (including screen captures) was created using a WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, but everything noted here is equally applicable to IBM Workload Deployer V3. However, for the sake of consistency with the images presented, “WebSphere CloudBurst” is used throughout this article to refer to both products.
In other words, IBM Workload Deployer deploys the middleware systems and Deployit deploys applications to those middleware systems — complementary functionalities that form a perfect fit.
At XebiaLabs, we have been working on two exciting new integrations for Deployit. We created a Deployit plugin that enables you to deploy EAR files directly to virtual systems created by IBM Workload Deployer V3 or its predecessor, IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance V2. We also created a WebSphere CloudBurst script package to deploy application artifacts and resources on newly created virtual systems.
This article explores two integrations between WebSphere CloudBurst and Deployit as a way of showing how you can leverage the WebSphere CloudBurst command line interface and script packages to integrate cloud deployment with your application deployment automation solution.
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 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 Vincent Partington mid-afternoon: May 8th, 2011
At XebiaLabs, we have recently been working on an exciting new integration for Deployit, our deployment automation product. We’ve created a Deployit plugin that allows you to deploy EAR files directly to virtual systems created by IBM’s WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance (WCA).
But a small piece of background first. Deployit and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance both “deploy” things. But they deploy different things. Deployit deploys application artifacts and resources such as EAR files and data sources to middleware systems like WebSphere Application Server (but also HTML to web servers, MQ configuration to queue managers, etc.). The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance on the other hand, deploys patterns (topologies) of virtual images to hypervisors. But not just any kind of virtual images. It is especially geared towards deploying middleware topologies. In other words, the software Deployit wants to deploy to! This means that the functionalities of WCA and Deployit are a perfect fit; have WCA deploy the middleware systems and have Deployit deploy applications to those middleware systems.
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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 Robert van Loghem in the early morning: August 16th, 2010
In my previous post, “future of deployment, part 2″, i talked about the new ear, which is an image, with an OS and your application.
Now before diving into part 3, which gets you going in creating your own virtual appliance aka “the image”, there is one really big thing i forgot to mention; Some of the benefits of delivering a virtual appliance and getting it from your own development to the production environment! and i’ll list the benefits for administrators/ops and developers.
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