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!
As the DevOps movement becomes increasingly popular, so do tools that can automate application deployments. In a recent report by Gartner, the world’s largest information technology research and advisory company, Nolio’s application release automation (ARA) is cited as one such tool that can help IT organizations to limit downtime, ensure faster time to market and allow a quicker delivery of new features .
Could application release automation (ARA) solutions be the key to building a successful DevOps practice in your organization?
According to the latest Gartner report by Ronni J. Colville, the answer is yes! As an emerging movement, DevOps may have improved communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams but it still hasn’t absolutely mastered its ultimate goal of unifying their work. In her report, Ronni J. Colville argues that DevOps can be greatly enhanced by the use of application release automation (ARA) tools and specifically cites Nolio as one such solution. Read More
An interesting discussion unfolded on LinkedIn this week, revolving around whether Enterprises are starting to implement Devops to overcome their technical challenges.
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Nolio Improves Application Release Productivity 30% With Latest Release of Nolio ASAP
Nolio, a leading provider of application release automation, today announced Nolio ASAP 3.1, the latest version of its software platform designed to enable IT operations and Devops teams to be 30 percent more productive and eliminate human error during maintenance and upgrades of data center enterprise applications.
Jez has written a piece over at the CM Crossroads site with five predictions for 2011 –
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Due to the fact that cloud based technology has transformed infrastructure provisioning for enterprise applications into a relatively simple and less expensive process, many operational teams are investigating the possibility of migrating some of their application portfolio to the cloud. However, they soon discover that the simplicity, cost savings, and effectiveness characterizing application provisioning and initial deployment in the cloud does not apply to ongoing deployment and application services. Instead, they discover that the management and execution of ongoing application release events turns out to be as complex and challenging as they are in physical non-cloud environments. I’ll discuss why the server image as the primary tool for deploying applications to the cloud does not provide a solution to the challenges posed by enterprise applications to ongoing deployments, and will point the direction to where such a solution may be found.
We were recently approached by a large retailer who needed help with their application deployments. One of the options that came up was manifest application deployment, whereby the application would be paired with an XML manifest that describes the application resources, payload, and assemblies. Since this manifest is a kept in the companies source control all changes are tracked and version-ed. Various stake-holders of the application are responsible for keeping the manifest intact and valid, including parameters for data file locations, database queries that need to get executed during deployment, and services that need to get installed and updated. An example manifest would look something like this:
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Paul has a really great post about how agile development moved the bottle neck from development to IT operations. In chapter three of Paul’s “Agile Blind Spot” series, he shares his personal view on the disconnect between dev and ops, providing an example of a six month backlog of production deployment. Premature Optimization is about optimizing before we know that we need to do it, and although often applied to coding level, Paul feels that working on yesteryears bottle neck is just plain muda.
I was lucky enough to hear Adrian delivery his state of the union presentation when he was visiting Israel. The founder of jclouds went out and interviewed a bunch of Devops trend makers in order to consolidate their ideas and map out the landscape of devops. Adam Jacob, Ernest Mueller, Grig Gheorghiu, James Turnbull, Joe Williams, Luke Kanies, Patrick Debois, and Sacha Labourey were among the interviewees in Adrian’s study. Read More
