Deployment

Fred Kouwenberg, Sales Director at Logicalis SMC looks at a key challenge today’s agile organisations pose for operations teams – deploying new releases to production immediately after development and testing is completed – arguing that an automatic and transparent process, agile deployment, is required if applications are to be delivered successfully.

The highly competitive nature of the enterprise software industry has forced many organisations to adopt software production methodologies that ensure rapid delivery of new services to production. But that truncated development process has created a series of challenges – in order to meet business objectives, organisations must fulfil customer expectations for constant improvement by establishing short feedback loops between the market and the development teams.

That has given rise to the “agile” approach; which aims to shorten the software development lifecycle by taking an iterative and incremental approach.  The basic principle of iterative and incremental development is software development moves forward in small cycles, or iterations. Each iteration is a micro-implementation of the overall software development lifecycle. It starts with planning, continues to development and testing, and ends in deployment.

Tremendous Challenge

This cyclic approach enables organisations to be more receptive to their customer base, since user feedback on each iteration impacts the development course of subsequent ones. At the same time, the business value of the application increases because its functions are constantly being evaluated, modified and perfected.

However, an agile organisation poses a tremendous challenge for operations teams: How do you deploy new releases to production, where they can be reviewed by users and possibly generate revenue, immediately after development and testing?

The solution is to ensure that the deployment process is fully automatic and transparent. We refer to this integration of the deployment station with the iterative and incremental approach as Zero Touch Deployment. In its extreme form, release to production is automatically triggered by the successful promotion of a new build from the acceptance testing station.

The Complexities of Deployment Automation

However, automating the deployment of large-scale data centre applications is not easy to achieve, especially if we set out to provide a complete answer to the deployment needs of agile organisations.

One complexity arises from the different types of deployment events agile organisations produce – they can range from a full installation of the application to a minor update or even a single configuration file update and each requires the creation and maintenance of a different automatic deployment process.

As a result, an automatic deployment system must be able to simplify application deployment tasks and mitigate risks; turning what would otherwise be complex, manual operations into reliable, repeatable and error-free processes.

All this means that any automatic deployment process must be comprised of separate deployment flows, one for each application component or tier. Therefore, to enable the deployment of multi-tier applications, an automation deployment system must be able to capture the tier-based architecture of the deployed applications:

An automatic deployment mechanism to coordinate the execution order of co-dependent tier-specific deployment flows.

A script-based system can use a build management tool to coordinate between the execution of the different tier deployment scripts.

An automated release platform can enable the user to specify the co-dependent relations by drawing connectors between nodes representing the different tier-dedicated flows.