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 Vincent Partington at around evening time: December 20th, 2010
In my two previous blogs I compared deployment automation to build automation and release management automation respectively. Build automation tools automate the building of software while deployment automation focuses on deploying the software after it has been built. In the other blog I explained that release management tools manage the release process of software but don’t do the actual work. In this blog I will compare deployment automation to server provisioning automation and here the distinction is harder to make. So please bear with me!
Let’s start by defining server provisioning. We can look at the ubiquitous Wikipedia definition or at the one from wordIQ. They tell a similar story; Server provisioning is about making a server ready for service. It usually involves activities such as:
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Posted by Andrew Phillips late at night: December 8th, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, my ever-active colleagues Marco Mulder and Serge Beaumont organised an nlscrum meetup about “Combining Scrum and Operations”, with presentations by Jeroen Bekaert and devopsdays organiser Patrick Debois.
Unfortunately, I was late and only managed to catch the tail end of Patrick’s well-delivered talk explaining how Dev/ops can become Devops. Thankfully, the lively open space discussions that followed provided plenty of interesting insights, comments and general food for thought.
One recurring theme that particularly struck me was the comment, uttered with regret by many in Operations, that they would very much like to help and coordinate with the development teams but inevitably were always too busy keeping the production environment up and running.
In other words, helping prepare for new releases might be desirable, but achieving the five nines, or whatever SLA Operations has committed to1, will always be paramount.
This is a fallacy! Indeed, one of the core realisations of the “Devops mindset”, to me, is that 99.999…% uptime is not an end in itself, but a means to an end: delivering the greatest business value possible. And aiming for the highest possible availability may not be the best way to go about it!2
Posted by Vincent Partington in the early afternoon: November 25th, 2010
In a previous blog, I compared deployment automation to build automation. I wrote about the differences between the build and the deployment process and I explained why different features are required from the respective automation tools. In this blog I will explain the difference between release management and deployment and why release management tools that claim they do deployment automation are actually doing something different. And why that is a good thing. 
Let’s start by defining release management. While Wikipedia might define release management as a relatively new discipline in the application lifecycle management space, it has actually been a part of ITIL v2 since its release in 2000. It concerns itself with the management of software releases. Courtesy of the ITIL Open Guide, the key activities of release management are:
Posted by Robert van Loghem mid-afternoon: November 11th, 2010
Last week (november 3rd) Andrew Phillips and myself did a presentation on continuous deployment at the awful (so we thought) hour of 8 o’clock in the morning for the NLJUG. We only expected a handful of attendees but fortunately the day before we were told that we had moved to a bigger conference room because of the great number of people signing up! So at 8 o’clock we had about <100 people in the room! So, if you were there, thanks for coming so early, we really appreciate it. It of-course shows that continuous deployment is a hot topic 
Doing the continuous deployment talk at JFall
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Posted by Vincent Partington mid-afternoon: October 12th, 2010
Since make was introduced in 1977 to automatically build software, more areas of the software construction and release process have been automated. In fact, anybody building serious software without automating their builds, their tests and without using continuous integration is not considered to be a professional. A hot topic within the application lifecycle management (ALM) space is deployment automation. This is driven by middleware environments getting bigger and more complex, by the increasing number of application releases demanded by modern businesses, and by the fact that application deployment needs to happen reliably to not disrupt online services and businesses. Add to that the fact that cloud infrastructure is becoming more mainstream by the day, you can bet there is a lot happening in this space.
At XebiaLabs we have developed Deployit and that has given us a lot of insight into the deployment automation domain. This is the first blog in a series that will explore that domain by comparing deployment automation with a number of related topics.
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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!
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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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.
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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…)