It stands to reason that, the faster an application release or update moves through the stages for release, the more money a company can make. So why not adopt the concept of a production line for deploying applications? It worked for the auto industry! But what exactly does that mean for an application release and for everyone involved?

According to the Collins English Dictionary, a production line is a factory system in which parts of components of the end product are transported by a conveyor through a number of different sites at each of which a manual or machine operation is performed on them without interrupting the flow of production.

Applying this concept is simple. All you need is an application release automation tool such as Nolio ASAP. Automation is what creates the application production line, pushing along a product through each station and preventing delays.

With a manual deployment, an application has to go through the various departments and inevitably gets stuck for extended periods of time. Because each team is only focused on their one purpose, they aren’t paying attention to how their actions will affect previous or future tasks. In addition, as a result of manual work, the chance of introducing errors increases ten-fold. The application production line streamlines the release process eliminating ineffective manual developments and ensuring predictability.

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s Application Release Automation Platform

Click here to download the White Paper ‘Application Release Automation with Zero Touch Deployment’

Click here to read ‘Application Deployment 101’

This seminar will be led by Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron, who will explore the potential of embedding the extensive capabilities of deployment automation in this environment. In a live demonstration, he will show how Zero Touch Deployment™ can be achieved in TFS 2010 in order to reduce errors, lower costs, increase operational throughput and accelerate time-to-market of application releases.

View a sneak preview of this fascinating event! We’ve put some highlights of this event online so you can get an idea what to expect. While you’re at it, start thinking now about questions you want to ask our expert!

“The successful integration of an automated solution will facilitate rapid and accurate continuous releases, automated selective deployments, increased traceability and a comprehensive release repository.”
Ron Gidron, Product Director at Nolio

There is still time for you to learn about these cutting-edge technologies and pose all your application deployment questions to our expert in a dedicated Q & A session. Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity and register today!

The webinar will start at 10am GMT on Wednesday the 25^th of January.

Are you also a BizTalk user? Don’t miss out on ‘Zero Touch BizTalk Deployment’ happening on Tuesday, January 24 at 11am EST/4pm GMT.

Click here to register for TFS

Click here to register for BizTalk

Click here to download the TFS White Paper

About the Presenter

Ron Gidron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

In our latest webinar, ‘Zero Touch BizTalk Deployments’, Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron will show how you can fully automate complex deployments for your Microsoft BizTalk applications! He will demonstrate how the successful realization of fully automated application releases can reduce errors, lower costs, increase operational throughput and accelerate time-to-market!

Mr. Gidron will explain how you can:

1. Achieve full control of BizTalk applications, host instances, orchestrations and bindings
2. Fully automate all aspects of applications deployment and configuration
3. Create reusable deployment processes across multiple BizTalk versions
4. Reduce your dependency on command line and complex manual deployments of BizTalk applications.

“Using Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ platform can dramatically improve application deployments. We have a number of out-of-the-box actions that can seamlessly run across multiple servers regardless of version.  Our platform for Zero Touch Deployment™ is fast, reliable, reusable and completely manageable. It will save everyone the time and headache caused by deploying BizTalk applications!” – Ron Gidron, Nolio Product Director

Following the presentation, all participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question & answer session with Mr. Gidron.

This webinar will be held on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT.  Click here to register today.

We will also be hosting a webinar, ‘Achieving Zero Touch Deployment™ in a Microsoft TFS Environment’ on Wednesday, January 25^th, 2012 at 10am GMT. Click here to learn more and register now.

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deployment.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Simply email all your questions to clare@noliosoft.com and we’ll do our best to add them to our webinar agenda. You’re free to ask any question about the zero touch deployment process – from overcoming common complexities like multi-tier applications and multiple servers to understanding the function and benefits of automation in an agile world. Our application release automation expert Benny Van de Sompele will guide you through the key aspects of Zero Touch Deployment, while carefully tailoring the program to cover all your questions and areas of interest.

In order to ensure your question will be included in the webinar, please email us before Friday, July 22, 2011.

Paving the Way for Zero Touch Deployment with Manifest Deployments will be held on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm BST (GMT+1). Register online today.

Don’t miss this chance to shape the content of this valuable and educational webinar. Email us your questions today!

MORE ABOUT THE  WEBINAR
‘Paving the Way for Zero Touch Deployment with Manifest Deployments’ will show you how to overcome the numerous challenges and complexities of application releases: such as the perpetually increasing volume and frequency of deployments, the burden of selecting unique data resources per release, and the complications of orchestrating releases on multi-tier applications across hundreds of servers.

Learn how Manifest Deployment practices can overcome all these complexities in order to facilitate fully automated, reliable and repeatable processes that ensure agile operations and IT governance and compliance.

These scripts then need to be continually maintained and tweaked for each lab or environment. This results in very high maintenance costs and very low efficiency. Companies simply can’t afford operating this way when it comes to data center applications uptime.

This is where the Nolio Application Automation solution becomes useful.

Nolio’s solution has a unique ability to design once, then execute in multiple environments, without the need to update and customize the automation for every new or slightly different lab, environment or datacenter.

This is achieved thanks to Nolio’s patent-pending technology [link to patent post], which focuses on multi-layer, complex application components, architectures, topologies and parameters.

As a result, Nolio’s customers achieve incredibly fast implementation time. Using Nolio’s application automation tools, dozens of workflows can be automated in a few days to a few weeks, and become fully operational in production environments and in Development, QA and staging environments.

However, there are several tools and methodologies available today to service infrastructure, including software distribution, server provisioning, network management automation, virtualization, virtualization management software, and storage configuration and management.

In contrast, no platform exists today to help with application operational tasks – also known as Application Service Automation. These tasks include complex application deployment, application configuration changes, troubleshooting and recovery.

There are three main areas that make application service automation different from infrastructure service automation:

Task Complexity

Many of the infrastructure automation tasks involve repetitive tasks on many devices, usually on same-server types or devices, or according to domains. The nature of automation in this case is perform the tasks on a group of servers together, or according to domains.

In contrast, application services usually involve multiple server types/domains. The processes needed to service applications are complicated, involving numerous steps, strict procedures, and a variety of machines.  Anyone who has gotten the “checklist” for an application release process knows how complicated this can be, and how unlikely it is for two people to actually do every step in exactly the same way, regardless of how well documented the process is.

Dependencies

With infrastructure service automation, the focus is on updating the device.  With application service automation, teams must understand the application architecture – which servers are mapped to each other and how all servers depend on each other. In order to automate a process, they need to understand which particular application servers connect to precisely which database servers.

Order

When servicing infrastructure, it doesn’t matter if this router gets its new configuration first or which server gets its security patch first.  But for application service automation, order of operations matters. To update an application, the application logic is important.  You might need to take down the database server first, then the application server, and finally the Web server, before making changes. And if you do not have maintenance windows, you may need to bring down a very particular part of the application first, make your changes, and only after that part is back up and running, do the next group of servers in a rolling update.

Today’s application service teams require automated tools that understand the architecture and logic inherent in the applications they service.  To learn more about how Nolio supports task complexity, grouping, dependencies and order with Nolio Automation Center, please visit www.noliosoft.com.