Curing Continuous Delivery Headaches: UrbanCode Tools Level Up
AnthillPro
The Continuous Delivery toolmakers over at UrbanCode released two significant upgrades to their toolsets for helping companies follow the DevOps philosophy. A new release for AnthillPro (a Continuous Delivery pipline platform) was focused on bug fixes, but a
handful of nice little features were added as well to deal with common
headaches:
- Read only views of configuration: Editors used to be the only ones who could view the configuration of projects, workflows and jobs. Now, those with “read” only permissions can review the configuration if granted rights to the Admin tab.
- Visibility into inherited properties: The project-environment property screen also shows inherited properties from the system, environment or project along with where the value was set.
- BuildLife Deleted Event: An internal event fires when a build life is deleted. If you want to send emails or launch processes when BuildLives die, the hook is available.
- Tweaks to “keep at least X days” cleanup rules: The calculation can now be based either on the time since the BuildLife was created, or since the status was applied.
Mastering Complex Deployments Guide
This section of the news was written by Christopher Strah.
uDeploy
We’re also excited to announce the release of version 4.5 of uDeploy – our Application Release Automation product.
Learn to use uDeploy with Hudson/Jenkins
uDeploy 4.5’s new features are a direct result of customer feedback, and make it even more powerful than before. The workflow editor has been enhanced, and is now cleaner and easier to navigate. It also delivers easy-to-model processes with splits and joins, conditional branching, and automated remediation strategies.
Additionally, uDeploy 4.5 makes deployments faster and more reliable with component templates. Users can now manage configurations in one centralized location, and then create components that inherit a configuration automatically; allowing component processes to be reused.
More killer features in uDeploy 4.5 include:
- Redesigned Workflow Editor: Easy to model processes with splits and joins, conditional branching, automated remediation steps, and smoother navigation
- Component Templates: Configure less and with greater reliability by creating reusable templates for components
- Artifact Retention Policy: Administrators can now set a number of days to keep artifacts that have not been involved in any deployment
- Configuration Verification: uDeploy reduces deployment failures by checking that all environmental settings are properly configured before attempting a deployment
- New Plugin Version & Upgrade System: New Plugin Version & Upgrade System – Test and production instances now display the version of the plugin you’re using and plugin versions are incremented on every update; not just when an API changes
- Include/Exclude Filters for SVN Imports: Imports: Specify which files and directories to import when a tag contains more artifacts than you need
- Updated In-Product Help System & PDF Documentation Set
uDeploy 4.5 is out and available for download on the UrbanCode Supportal.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Jammer Man replied on Wed, 2012/04/04 - 9:49am
Eric Minick replied on Wed, 2012/04/04 - 12:57pm
Really? We replace Jekins installations on a pretty regular basis. For simple projects, we actually have reccommended people check out Jenkins. When things scale to large sizes (thousands of developers) or have complex interproject dependencies, Anthill can do amazing things for build and has a much more mature pipeline / lifecycle approach. Different tools for different use cases.
On the deploment side, the mechanics of doing a deployment are not the hard part. We can write scripts or recipes for doing a deployment in a variety of tools. Sure, tool like uDeploy that have integrations with IIS or Websphere are nice but the raw automation can be scripted.
Organizations step up to commercial deployment tools when they have needs like:
- We deploy multiple builds in a coordinated fashion, and need to version the system (collection of builds) based on what is passing tests in some environment. How do we manage the 15 different projects that are interdependent at run time?
- We need a really clear view of what is installed on each server, how it got there, and who put it there
- We need role based security that is environment aware. While we want to use the same deploy process in each environment, we're legally required to have different Prod deployers than dev test deployers.
- We have 100 similar projects, can we reuse the configuration of the deployment process in a parameterized way?
- We don't just deploy builds, but also have to deal with incremental file moves. How do we track and promote collections of those?
- etc, etc, etc.
uDeploy actually integrates with Jenkins, TeamBuild, and a host of other CI tools.Jammer Man replied on Mon, 2012/07/30 - 10:33am
in response to:
Eric Minick
Ragdu Bagdu replied on Wed, 2012/07/25 - 1:22am
in response to:
Jammer Man
Rava Nava replied on Thu, 2012/07/26 - 1:15am
in response to:
Jammer Man