One of the UK’s largest financial institutions completely redeveloped its e-commerce applications suite and selected MidVision’s RapidDeploy™ solution to automate and control deployments across the technology suite enabling deployment of entire test systems to take just 50 minutes, reducing environment downtime by as much as 500 hours across the life-time of the project and enabling controlled deployments to take place by globally distributed development teams with minimal training.
Business Needs
The client completely re-engineered its eCommerce solution using a combination of the following technologies:
- IBM WebSphere Portal Server
- IBM WebSphere Content Manager
- IBM WebSphere Process Server
- IBM WebSphere Application Server
- IBM HTTP Server
- IBM WebSphere DataPower
The client’s requirement was to support continuous integration and fully automate the above technology stack to enable ‘single click’ unattended deployment across the following environments:
- Integration Test
- System Test
- System Integration Test
- Performance and Operational Acceptance Test
- Production
Each environment consisted of at least 70 individual deployable components across the technology stack.
In addition to enabling fully automated unattended deployment there was a requirement for full audit and access controls to be in place to ensure that only certified personnel were able to perform deployment activities. The solution needed to be simple to enable 3rd parties and offshore partners to be able to execute deployments where necessary with the minimum of training.
The Solution
Already an existing user of MidVision’s RapidDeploy™ for IBM WebSphere Application Server and HTTP Server, the client decided to extend the use of RapidDeploy™ by employing additional modular components of the toolset to cover the additional technologies within their e-commerce solution.
With this software, the client was able to consolidate multiple daily deployment tasks into a single easy to use interface and reduce any resultant defects associated with deploying complex applications across complex infrastructure environments whilst providing absolute surety that what was tested in each test environment is exactly what gets deployed to the production estate.
RapidDeploy™ was integrated with the client’s configuration management tool to standardise the process across multiple projects, parallel development streams and components. In this way development teams manage their builds within an overall framework applied across the programme.
Along with the new components of the solution, MidVision also re-engineered the existing custom deployment solution that existed for some of the existing application components and integrated them fully with RapidDeploy™ providing complete consistency of deployment from soup to nuts for the system.
In the program manager’s own words:
“The program bought into the standardised management technique offered by the Midvision RapidDeploy™ tooling early on in our delivery lifecycle. The architecture lends itself to requiring this type of tooling given its broad technology set and scale, in addition to the requirement to use this as a Bank standard. MidVision have worked with us to ‘wrap’ the new technologies being introduced (e.g. IBM Websphere Process Server, Lotus Web Content Manager) with the processes offered as well as extending its application into the heritage components re-used from the existing channel systems to ensure we can leave a consistent and strategic Application Build and Deployment tool for the Internet platform”
Benefits
Reduced deployment times
Today, a complete deployment of 72 components of the eCommerce solution takes 50 minutes.
Optimised resource utilisation
Build and deployment may be initiated by non-technical staff, ensuring that technical staff are not tied up performing deployment activities. This reduced the technical administration workforce by in excess of 4FTE.
Increased Infrastructure Utilisation
The solution enables rapid deployment of any code version from any parallel development stream to an environment allowing for optimised use of infrastructure resources. The environments can be shared and may have multiple versions of code deployed to it in the same day.
Enhanced Management Information
Full auditing of the release baseline and its progress through environments is available and build and deployment management information has enabled the client to identify trends which have enabled swift remedial action to increase efficiency across both human and infrastructure resources.
Decreased Environment Defects
No manual ad-hoc changes are required to deployed environments, which has eliminated potential human error from production and test environments.
