DevOps Automation

NOTE: The “Team for Sample Release” is an out-of-box example.

This is a necessary step as you will not be able to add your participating applications to your new Release without this in place.  You are ready to move to the next step.

Step 4: Add any “Manual” applications (those not automated with UCD)

In your organization, when you release your software, you may have some applications that are manually deployed.   For example, you may have an SAP-based application that is updated manually along with a corresponding database that it leverages.   Your release team would like to track these updates and incorporate steps into a deployment plan for your release weekends.  To add manual applications, follow these steps:

• Navigate to Home > Applications
• Click the “Add New” button as shown below:

• Provide a name for your application, associate the Team properly, and select the Release Environments appropriate as shown below:

• Click Save
• Click on your new manual Application
• Click the “Add New” button to add some “Versions” that you can use to track what is being deployed during a release as shown in the example below:

Great job!   We are making excellent progress!   In the next section, we will configure our Release Environments.

Step 5: Add Release Environments

In this step, we will be adding any Release Environments we leverage that are not present with  the out-of-box installation.   After this is complete, we will map our IBM UrbanCode Deploy application environments discovered by the UCD integration to these Release Environments in UCR.

• Navigate to Home > Environments
• Click on the “Release Environments” sub-tab
• Click “Add Release Environment” as shown below to add any Release Environments in the left-hand pane that you require:

          For example, you may have multiple QA environments (e.g. QA-1, QA-2, QA-3) or multiple CERT environments (e.g. CERT-1, CERT-2).   Add any environments you need as shown above in the left-hand pane.

• For the applications you will be leveraging in your release, drag and drop the Application and environment found in the right-hand pane to the corresponding Release Environment found in the left-hand pane as shown below:

For example, the Application Sum-App with Environment DEV would be mapped to DEV-1.   Similarly, the Sum-App with Environment QA would be mapped to QA-1.  Repeat this for all of your target environments.

You are now ready to create your first Deployment Plan.

Step 6: Create a Release

In this section, we will create our example Release and add our participating applications.   Follow these steps:

• Navigate to Home > Releases & Deployments
• Click the “Add New” button on the Releases sub-tab
• Enter a name, select your Lifecycle, select your Team, and provide a target date as shown below:

• Click Save
• Click on your new Release to edit it as shown below:

• Click the “Add New” button to add your participating applications as shown above.  
• When complete, you should see the applications as shown in the example below:

• For each phase in your release pipeline, click the “Environment Reservation” button and make your environment reservations for each environment as shown below:

NOTE: your environment reservations will show up in the Calendar view for all to see which is great for collaboration.   Further, without this reservation, the pipeline view will not display anything for a given environment.

• Click on the “Pipeline View” sub-tab for your release

• You should see your participating applications and what snapshots have been deployed to each target environment.

Our next and final step for this blog is to create our deployment plan to be used as we release our applications into each of the target environments.

Step 7: Create your Deployment Plans

Your release managers likely have a set of steps they follow during the release event.  These steps are often tracked in a spreadsheet, a Confluence page, or by using some other means.   The issue with them is that the larger team will not have visibility into this which is why everyone typically finds themselves in a conference call listening in and waiting for their turn to perform their tasks. 

Using IBM UrbanCode Release, we can digitize this experience and provide everyone with visibility into this activity.   To get started, you will create a “Deployment Plan” and often you can leverage the spreadsheet from a release manager as your guide to create segments, manual and automated tasks, and more.   Please follow the steps below to get started:

• Navigate to Home > Releases & Deployments

• Click on the “Deployment Plans” sub-tab as shown below:

• Click “Create/Import Plan” as highlighted above

• Provide a name for your deployment plan and select your new Release as shown below:

• Click Save

• You will now create Segments and then Tasks (manual and automated) for each segment.
  • Keep in mind that you can have steps in a Segment that run in sequential order or can be run in parallel.
  • Keep in mind that each segment can specify a dependency on other segments before they can be started.
  • Consider steps that can only be run in certain environments or once per environment.
  • Consider segments that could be run in parallel
  • Consider adding a “tag” for different types of steps. This is helpful when you execute the release to see progress on a dashboard.

NOTE: you can specify the typical "Duration" for a task as shown above.   Further, you can specify an "Executor Role" and if the step is dependent on a particular application being deployed.   Notice that I added a "Task Tag" as shown above which is helpful for collaboration in a deployment dashboard.

• Here is an example of what a deployment plan could look like:

 
NOTE: some of the segments above are setup such that they can run in parallel (e.g. "Deploy iSeries Updates" and "Deploy Mainframe Changes" can be run in parallel by two different teams).   You can also see a task dependency graph by clicking an icon in the plan.  Here is an example:

• When you are complete, be sure to associate this deployment plan with your lifecycle for the release you created as shown below. Some of our clients create a “Production” plan and a “Non-Production” plan which could have different segments and tasks.   Others have a single “Production” plan that is used for each phase of the lifecycle and they use settings for the tasks to delineate what should be run in each environment phase.

Our first Release is now configured and ready to test.   I hope you found this guide helpful as you get started with IBM UrbanCode Release.

Here is a link to a video showing many of the tips covered in this blog post along with a short demo of IBM UrbanCode Release. 

In my next blog, I will walk through an example of how to schedule and execute a deployment plan against a target release environment.