Application Release Automation Tools Improve Communication and Visibility
You may be asking yourself, why should I consider application release automation tools? Why should I spend my annual budget on something that we can do in-house? What will it really do for me?
In a recent Gartner report, analyst Ronni J. Colville answers this question and more!
Today, formal processes between developers and production engineers are few and far between. This lack of an established system as well as limited communications in many of today’s organizations is specifically targeted as barriers to a successful DevOps practice.
The problems in communication are often due to the deployment processes. When the developers finish a code, they place it in a repository. The operation team picks it up and runs preproduction testing to confirm that updates and enhancements are in sync with existing development environments, which they rarely are. Communication along the application production line is extremely limited. Achieving clear and effective communication between developers, QA and operations is a near miracle.
Application release automation solutions can resolve these issues by allowing complete visibility so that everyone can see what is happening in the various stages of application deployment, allowing the process to be streamlined. Tools such as Nolio ASAP provide a graphical interface and can automate alerts so that stakeholders know exactly where an application stands in the release process as well as what needs to be done next and by whom. In addition, visibility requires the establishment of a model of the application and its configuration for each environment. For optimal visibility, however, we need more than just a transparent process. A major benefit of application release automation tools is that they provide a means to create application models in various environments with externalized and variable configuration settings.
Click here to find out more about Nolio’s ARA tools
Click here to read the full Gartner report
Click here to learn more about Gartner analyst Ronni J. Colville
