Impressions from Agile2010
Posted by Wilco Koorn mid-morning: August 23rd, 2010
Last week I enjoyed to opportunity to speak at the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. Of course, I also attended many of the other sessions as well. The conference has in my view an excellent atmosphere. Where I expected to find lots of consultants in their typical formal style of dressing I found 1400 people mostly dressed in T-shirt, jeans and sneakers instead. This must be the result of the Agile movement itself where people are first class citizens right?
The portfolio of Agile2010 contains ‘hardcore technical’ sessions like tutorials in Clojure coding, real ‘softcore’ sessions like “Behavior Driven Development for Life” which advocated using Neural Linguistic Programming techniques straight from psychology and also sessions around themes like Leadership and Coaching. Don't worry, the conference organizing committee splits these nicely up in ‘Themes’ and ‘Stages’ so even if you only look at the program by a glance, you’ll hardly ever end up in an unwanted session.
This is what I picked up from the conference in summary (you'll find all the details below):
- Conference focus (or lack thereof)
- "Religious wars" between Scrum, Kanban, Xp, Lean, ...
- Agile adoption in organizations worldwide
- "Value points" (compare to "Complexity points")
- "Switch"
- Company improvement backlog
Next I'll elaborate a bit about my own experience as a speaker. The combination of what I picked up and my speaker experience will give you a good basis to decide if you want to put next year’s edition (Salt Lake City August 7-13, 2011) in your agenda or not be it as an attendee or as a speaker. Enjoy!
Future of Deployment – Part 2.5 Getting your virtual appliance from development to production
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.
(more...)
Implementing Outside Deployment Solutions for Best Practice
Posted by Reint Jan Holterman in the early evening: July 26th, 2010
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.
(more...)
Customize This: Tailoring deployment packages to your target environments
Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-afternoon: July 5th, 2010
Sometime in the bright future, you will be able to deploy the same virtual appliance containing your application to all your target environments without adjustments. For the time being, however, deployments to traditional DTAP1 landscapes almost always mean "tweaking" the application and associated configuration and resources to match the target environment - think endpoints, properties files or datasource usernames and passwords, to name but a few.
In the absence of any established standards or even guidelines in this area, many different solutions to this problem of deployment package customization have been employed, from fairly elegant approaches such as JMX to crude string search-and-replace.
Furthermore, different types of middleware platforms have varying degrees of support for customizations: typically, portals, ESBs and process servers offer some "native" solution to the problem, whereas application servers tend to leave users to fend for themselves.
More often than not, the result is a chaotic mix of customization approaches across projects, target platforms and departments2. Here, we'll look at some of these approaches, classify them and examine some drawbacks and benefits. (more...)
Deployment in the Cloud: Reining in Virtual Sprawl
Posted by Reint Jan Holterman around lunchtime: June 28th, 2010
Virtualization and cloud computing have exploded over the past few years. A recent study shows that 90 percent of businesses have implemented server virtualization at some level and Gartner estimates the current market for cloud services is $46.4 billion and will reach $150.1 billion by 2013. With other estimates saying business applications can be made three to five times less expensive and consumer applications five to ten times cheaper, it’s no wonder it’s taking off.
Among other benefits, virtualization and cloud computing are helping companies remove physical dependencies from network resources, respond faster to changing IT-infrastructure needs, and lower overall costs. While this is all well and good, as companies add more and more virtual resources to their network, they struggle to keep track of them. The reason? Virtual sprawl.
(more...)
Webinar: Improving Agile Development through Deployment Automation
Posted by Reint Jan Holterman in the early morning: June 14th, 2010
IT organizations often face issues when deploying applications in an Agile environment, in part, because there are more releases to deploy. Due to the nature of Agile, development teams are able to deliver working tested software in much shorter iterations. While this is great for the company, as they can have better flexibility and shorter time to market, it often creates a backlog for operations teams who need to deploy the applications as quickly as they’re being delivered.
Before Agile, releases usually took place every two to three months; whereas, now, issuing a release every two to three weeks is standard. As a result, the improvements in productivity and quality for development when using Agile can be quite astounding, gaining around 400-500 percent. So, with development teams delivering a practically constant stream of software packages, operations teams need to be able to deploy them just as quickly to keep business objectives aligned.
Deploying releases manually is a complicated process that is only exacerbated by issues of virtual sprawl and poor upkeep of scripts and instruction manuals. However, having an automated deployment process keeps these frequent releases on schedule and error free. With deployment automation software, IT organizations are able to bridge the gap between development and operations teams, enabling them to maintain the higher productivity levels, shorter time to market, and other advantages Agile brings to a company.
Deployment automation allows IT organizations to continue to safely and reliably deploy their software components in an Agile environment while maintaining good cooperation and delivery between development and operations teams.
This is a hot topic in the industry right now and will be the focus of an upcoming webcast that we are sponsoring and presenting in conjunction with CM Crossroads this Thursday, June 17, at 1pm EST. Andrew Phillips, VP of Product Development at XebiaLabs, and Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief of CM Crossroads, will discuss the issues IT organizations face when deploying applications in an Agile environment and how deployment automation can ensure seamless transitions.
Click here to register and join the discussion, and feel free to leave a comment below if you’d like a specific question answered. Hope to see you there!
Future of deployment: Part 2 – The Image in the Cloud is the new EAR
Posted by Robert van Loghem mid-afternoon: June 13th, 2010
Last December I wrote my first part on the Future of Deployment explaining the difference between big ol' servers with a gazillion applications and lots of new shiny small servers with each its own application. This time I'm going to go to the cloud or your virtualized servers and give you my vision of how we are going to package and deploy applications in about 3-5 years.
How we used to deploy an application
Well you all know this one by heart: You get your environment up and running, like, install an application server, setup your database, choose a sql script to run against the database, configure resources and deploy the application in the application server. After everything is in place you start the whole bunch and bask in glory!
Does the above deployment scenario apply to virtualized/cloudy environments. Yes it does, of course! The environment setup is greatly simplified, using stuff like AMIs or virtual images aka appliances 
you get your database or application server out of the box but configuring and installing the application and configuration/resources is still the same old boring cumbersome task.
(more...)
Structuring a Deployment Package, part 1: Understanding the complexity
Posted by Vivek Kumar Yadav just before lunchtime: March 25th, 2010
A deployment package arguably is never just a single file to be dropped somewhere and you are done. No! Choosing and bundling your artifacts for deployment is none less complex than figuring out an efficient deployment strategy itself. The Java EE specification suggests EARs as the standard packaging and distribution mechanism but we all know that this is not enough. In reality the ‘deployment package’ comprises a whole list of artifacts and more:
- EARs
- WARs
- database scripts
- static content like images files and icons
- scripts to create queues, topics and data sources
- ...
In short, an EAR and a lot around it! But wait, there is still more, what about the plethora of environment specific configurations that also go along?
This leads to a few questions and the reason for this blog.
Implementing Deployit, part 2: technical considerations
Posted by Andrew Phillips around lunchtime: March 8th, 2010
In a recent post, XebiaLabs' CTO Vincent Partington discussed some important organizational topics you will want to address while introducing deployment automation using Deployit.
Preparing your organization is, of course, crucial to getting maximum possible benefits from deployment automation. A few technical considerations also apply when introducing Deployit, and here we'd like to go into these so that you can be sure your infrastructure is ready when it comes to carrying out your first fully automated deployment.
(more...)
Implementing Deployit, part 1: organizational aspects
Posted by Vincent Partington in the early morning: February 25th, 2010
Last month XebiaLabs released the Personal Edition of Deployit. Now that people have been able to experience in a simple environment how Deployit can work for them, you might wonder how to start using Deployit for real in your development and operations environments. In this blog and its sequel we will go over the things we've learned when starting to use Deployit. We will also be covering this subject (and a lot of other subjects!) in our upcoming Deployit webinar series.
There are organizational and technical consequences to introducing a deployment automation product. But let's focus on the organizational aspects first. These pointers will help you get started with implementing Deployit in your organization in the right way.
(more...)
Categories
- Java (292)
- Agile (137)
- General (98)
- Architecture (49)
- Scrum (46)
- Testing (45)
- Performance (42)
- Podcast (31)
- Middleware (34)
- Deployment (22)
- SOA (25)
- Project Management (24)
- Xebia Labs (23)
- Quality Assurance (16)
- lean architecture (15)
- Tools (12)
- Virtualization (10)
- Articles (9)
- Security (7)