DevOps orchestration ensures an organization's development, physical environments and processes are capable of delivering new builds into production as rapidly as possible.
The continuous delivery pipeline can be pictured as a factory and, like a factory, there is a certain level of specialization required for the various tasks that must be accomplished. However, while individual tasks or steps can be automated, the factory's end-to-end process - its output - is obviously the most important from a business perspective. Similarly, in DevOps, we have many specialized lifecycle tasks that are distinct from one another, but the most important measurement is the end release.
Firstly, there's design and development; next, there's testing (across multiple levels); then comes production monitoring and round she goes. While the stages are generally the same across teams and organizations, the specific requirements and preferences of said teams/organizations lead to a marketplace filled with thousands of tools for accomplishing generally similar tasks.
DevOps Orchestration: Beyond Standardization
In the days predating agile, the principle of standardizing was popularized by CIOs and vendors. The idea that a company can greatly benefit from standardizing tools and practices across all its infrastructure and business applications made a lot of sense in an age when agility wasn't the most critical competitive advantage.
Nowadays it's completely different.
As organizations compete in an ever-evolving and ever-improving world of customer experience, standardization has subsided. In its place, the enablement of teams has risen, granting the freedom to use any tools they deem fit for purpose. Results matter.
With an ever-growing set of technologies and tools, the challenge of automating an end-to-end process within a software factory becomes ever more critical. While enabling the separate teams to use their preferred tools freely is all well and good, the end-to-end process still needs to maintain the critical requirements of the company itself. Auditability, scale and security are just a few of these critical capabilities.
CA Automic Release Automation v12.1
This is where CA Automic Release Automation (CA ARA) comes in with the flexibility to seamlessly automate and orchestrate the entire toolchain. This applies before and after application deployment.
For example, an end-to-end process can include automating the build of the software at the development stage, the setup of test infrastructure in the Cloud or on-premise, the execution of a series of automated tests, the collection of results followed by triggering approval processes, and deployment into the next environment through to production.
In the above examples, there are many potential tools used by different teams - from an application release automation perspective this does not matter. In CA ARA v12.1, we have continued to increase our support for continuous delivery and DevOps orchestration. We've added more providers for our environment blueprint provisioning capability and more out-of-the-box integrations (all available on marketplace.automic.com) into the entire CA Continuous Delivery toolset, as well as into performance monitoring, test data automation and many more. We are very excited about this release.
Please visit our marketplace and watch the new demos to learn more about the exciting new v12.1 features!
