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…)
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.
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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!
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Posted by Vincent Partington mid-morning: February 10th, 2010
We’ve already been talking about Deployit, XebiaLabs’ deployment automation product, for some time. Now we are proud to announce that you can try Deployit for yourself by downloading the Personal Edition of Deployit!
If you don’t know what Deployit is yet, have a look at the movie below!
To summarize; Deployit will automate your Java EE application deployments and, because of the overview it offers and the history it keeps, it also allows you to manage and optimize your deployments.
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Posted by Vincent Partington in the wee hours: January 7th, 2010
Last year, before the Christmas holidays , I described how we do middleware integration testing at XebiaLabs and I described the way we deploy test servlets by wrapping them in WAR and EAR files that get generated on the fly. There is only one thing left to explain; how do we integrate these tests into a continuous build using Maven and VMware?
Running the middleware integration tests
So let’s start with the Maven configuration. As I mentioned in the first blog of this series, the integration tests are recognizable by the fact that the classnames end in Itest. That means they won’t get picked up by the default configuration of the Maven Surefire plugin. And that is fortunate because we don’t always want to run these tests. Firstly they require a very specific test setup (the application server configurations should be in an expected state, see below) and secondly they can take a long time to complete and that would get in the way of the quick turnaround we want from commit builds in our continuous integration system.
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