You’ve Made Your Choice – Automation
- No more ad-hoc management of your middleware and database technologies – you’re getting automation
- Reduced number of technologies doing the same thing in different ways – you’re consolidating
- Reduced number of Single Points of Failure, allow your “Heroes” to focus on the bigger picture – you’re increasing productivity
You have decided to achieve one or more of the above goals within your enterprise and you have identified a tool which promises to deliver the technical functionality required to manage your environments consistently, systematically and efficiently. (By the way RapidDeploy™ is the ideal tool to install, configure and deploy code to WebSphere Application Server, WeSsphere MQ, WebSphere Message Broker, JBoss application server, WebLogic, TomCat and many more).
The technology within an enterprise is only part of the picture. Your concerns may very well be; how do I actually use it? how can I fit it into our organization? how can I fit my organization around it?
We have clients asking us these very questions and fortunately for us (and them!) we have the answers. RapidDeploy™ is built around these very realities. It is truly an enterprise product that can scale to fit your organization. Role base access, separation of duties engineered from the ground up.
The reality is that in most large organizations a “big bang” approach is unrealistic. It can be done, and proper planning (which should be done in any case) will pay dividends, but this sort of thing can be built over time. Plan your strategy, then take action.
Pick a team, any team
RapidDeploy™ is ideally suited to supporting separation of responsibilities (which is very much becoming a regulatory mandate across most industries). If you want to start small perhaps look at those teams that are spending the most time maintaining the configuration of your Application Servers and other middleware across hundreds of heterogeneous environments. Most of that time is ensuring the correct files are copied to the correct locations and the correct commands are being run against the appropriate technologies.
The people doing these tasks are highly intelligent individuals often overwhelmed by the mundane and time consuming activity of moving files around or filling in spreadsheets or both. We have discussed at length in previous posts about the automation of this aspect and ensuring it is done the same way for every level within your route to live, but how do you make this work in practice and on a large scale?
Simple, Role based access and separation of duties which we implement with our user and group processes – for example in the case of Websphere Message Broker (WMB), we could create the group WMB Configuration Team. We can associate that group with the WMB Configure Projects that exist. Projects in this context are defined sets of tasks that have been written to automate the deployment of message broker configuration (e.g. creation of message brokers, execution groups, update of broker properties etc). We could have more than one such group for different teams (for example a production team and a pre-production team).
As well as restricting access to Projects to certain groups we can also do this against targets (i.e. Servers). This means that even though different teams may be executing the same Projects, your development deployment teams could be restricted from being able to deliver to your Production environment. Separation in this manner has the advantage that you don’t create a bottle neck for development work by giving your production configuration and admin teams this responsibility with their already significant commitments.
Separate groups can eventually be created for those that will deploy code, install binaries and any other deployment activity you have in mind. Once created the process is just standard user management to ensure the correct people are members of the correct groups.
Develop and Follow your Process
I am not saying that all this just falls out of the box, it does take planning, and so it should. We are not playing here, this is managing very important environments on a large scale. Something that we have considered through every stage of development of RapidDeploy™ . The advantage of starting with a smaller team means you have more flexibility as you develop your processes. Less people are impacted as you iron out the kinks.
Incremental migration means that the scale of your organization needn’t daunt you. Attack it piece by piece. RapidDeploy™ is ready for it, and so is MidVision. We are keen to help you on your way.
Check out our demo projects and quick start guides. We are more than happy to work through them with you as you develop your understanding. Head to Support > RapidDeploy 3.0 > Documentation to view our quick start guides for a wide range of technologies. Then contact us either directly or through our forums to explore how these demos can scale to fit entire organisations.
