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IBM UrbanCode Deploy and Red Hat Ansible: Better Together ... for IBM Z

By Laurel Dickson-Bull posted Mon June 28, 2021 11:23 AM

  
                                                                                                 

                                                              UrbanCode Deploy + Ansible = Better Together for IBM Z

Since IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, IBMers and customers have been asking me "Should Ansible be used in place of UrbanCode Deploy (now DevOps Deploy)?" My answer has  been: While Ansible is capable of automating deployments, which is UrbanCode Deploy's primary mission, and Ansible is a very powerful tool, UCD distinguishes itself as a most comprehensive deployment automation tool by its focus on the application itself. UrbanCode Deploy automates virtually any application deployment use case with governance, repeatably and with conformance to DevOps principles. For example, UCD deployment automation includes:
  • The ability to orchestrate the deployment of the various parts of a multitiered application all at the same time, in a repeatable, easy to understand way. This includes canary deployments, blue-green deployments and covers every platform from distributed to z/OS to OpenShift. 
  • Scheduling deployments and approvals are built-in as configured for the deployments. This allows you to use the same deployment process in dev, test, UAT, but get approvals as needed when code is moved up to the upper environments. UrbanCode Deploy "understands" that Dev comes before Test, before Prod.
  • UrbanCode Deploy also allows you to roll back a deployment in the case where you really need to quickly go back to a previous successful version of an application.
  • That's because as part of the deployment automation, UCD keeps an inventory of who deployed what, where, when, and this information can be produced for audits.
  • A visual deployment process editor that makes it easy to understand and easy to write a deployment process for people who are new to it, like mainframe devs and ops. 
Ansible Automation Platform is the enterprise framework for Ansible that enables a common approach to deploy hybrid applications and perform infrastructure management. 
UrbanCode users will appreciate these qualities from Ansible:
  • Ready-to-use Ansible for Z collections and playbooks to provision and configure your application infrastructure in your application deployment pipeline
  • Consistency across enterprise hybrid multi-cloud environments through a single coherent market leading automation solution
  • Limitless adaptation to user needs and integration with open source tools
  • Parallelism and ability to drive automation to multiple systems simultaneously
While UrbanCode Deploy's focus is on the application, Ansible's focus is on infrastructure. Both are powerful. In the demo you are about to see, UrbanCode Deploy calls Ansible to set up and check the environment while UCD deploys a multi-tiered application. The WOW! here this process is fully automated for IBM Z.  Check out this short video demonstration.


#DevOps
#IBMZ
#ansible
#deploy
#UrbanCodeDeploy

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