Orchestrate Application Release Management

SOA and Web Services create further complexity

By adopting a web services strategy enterprises must recognise the requirements to provide a continuously available service, along with consistent performance and response and with no room for disruption or corruption. They must provide the environment with sufficient capacity to meet user demand and they must sufficiently segregate those machines to enable full systems redundancy with “instantaneous recovery”. Into this complex environment they must be able to make changes without either disruption or corruption.

Automation is the answer.

Reed Bunting’s Automated Application Release Management solution addresses the heavily disjointed and highly manual process driven infrastructure support in pre-production environments. In particular, the solution integrates application development version control platforms, with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and the deployment mechanisms to build and deliver the right infrastructure (including application stack) with the right configurations at the right time, driven by a set of automated processes.

Key capabilities

Catering for this complex environment, Reed Bunting’s Orchestrate Application Release Management solution is based on the following key requirements:

• Reliability of change: Any change in the infrastructure stack brings the opportunity for error. Therefore changes must be accurate and effective. They must function to business requirement and deliver required customer functionality.
• Change must be delivered transparently to the customer, which means that any customer transaction will be completed even if changes are made to the system/application mid transaction.
• Time to market in an electronic marketplace. the enterprise is faced with getting products and services to the marketplace quickly. The IT organisation is challenged by the need to make more changes ever more quickly.
• Changes must be delivered in a timely manner and when required. Although changes have always had a dependence on business readiness (e.g. staff training and competence, marketing and advertising campaigns/launches, legislative changes coming into law etc.), due to the complex manual processes and hand-offs, IT has always found it difficult to enable change when required.
• An integrated business with inter communicating applications based on web services.
• Cost of implementation is critical. It is estimated that 90% of the cost associated with application change control and deployment tools is in the implementation, not the product. Time is money and the implementation man years needed to install these solutions impact the availability of those same resources to develop web based systems in response to market demand.

End-to-End Automation

Reed Bunting’s Automated Application Release Management covers the following areas:

• Application development and repository services
• Application build and packaging
• Deployment and configuration management
• Customer service management and installation services
• Auditable process management
• Administration and operational support tools for overall system and its components

Reed Bunting’s solution, which is based on abstracting the underlying technologies for change and deployment, is vendor agnostic. To this end, the solution is applicable to environments with:

• J2EE
• Microsoft .NET
• IBM WebSphere
• C/C++