Automating application release processes can help organizations establish and enable the use of best practices to deploy applications, related artifacts, configurations and data across the application lifecycle.
CA Release Automation takes this concept to the next level with a feature called Shared Components. Shared Components enable users to create reusable deployment workflows that can be shared across a multitude of applications and environments. Shared components can be used to define procedures for common deployment types and help organizations establish best practices to enforce consistency, ensuring teams follow the same standards throughout the organization.
As shown in the figure below, Release Automation Components contain the actions, flows, and parameters that are used to create an application deployment process. A shared component is designed so that it can be reused across any number of applications requiring the same component, e.g. a particular application server or load balancer.
Using reusable shared components not only reduces the amount of work required to create multiple workflows for similar deployments, but also helps reduce errors in the deployment process by ensuring that all teams follow the same guidelines for the deployment of standard application types. For example, if you have multiple applications that require a Tomcat server you can define a workflow as a shared component, enabling all applications needing a Tomcat server to use the exact same workflow without any changes.
With the latest release of CA Release Automation Action Packs, the team at CA has taken the concept a step further by providing Shared Components for the latest releases of the JBoss, VMware vSphere and IBM WebSphere Action Packs. For example, for the IBM WebSphere Action Pack there is a workflow now available to get a list of Nodes within a Cell and then a list of servers within a given Node. There’s a workflow to check the status of a WebSphere server and check the status of the application deployed to a WebSphere server.
Below is an example of a predefined Shared Component flow to Restart a WAS server.
And this is just a start. The team here at CA is diligently working on providing more content that you can take advantage of right out of the box. They’ve even put together a best practices document in addition to documentation on how to incorporate Shared Components and the actions within into your application deployment strategy. Just download the action pack and the Shared Components will be in the package. For a list of all Action Packs and Plug-ins please visit the Release Automation Integration Hub.