Deployment Planning and Automation

When development, test, and operations each deploy the same application at different time in the software delivery lifecycle to different environments, the process may be manual, time-consuming, and error-prone due to:

• Little shared understanding of deployment across these groups
• No shared automations
• No reuse of previous successful cycles, leading to configuration errors

In addition, physical test infrastructure is often time consuming to acquire and configure, expensive to manage and maintain, and underutilized between tests.

The IBM deployment planning and automation solution, a new approach to application deployment that leverages cloud-based infrastructure to help quickly develop and test new software , can help organizations:

• Plan your application deployment using discovered resources and/or standard configuration templates to reduce time and errors and improve communication of deployment requirements and the subsequent automation of provisioning tasks.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, middleware configuration, and application installation to repeatedly setup standardized environments in the cloud, remove costly manual errors, and dramatically reduce provisioning times.
• Govern and share application artifacts, standard templates, and deployment plans as well as trace development artifacts to deployed instances to support change management.

Plan
IBM Rational® Software Architect with Extensions for Deployment Planning provides a graphical environment in which to define the target topology and to plan activities to configure the machines within it and the middleware running on them.

IBM Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager helps you discover application dependencies and configurations, map applications and changes, and address compliance measures.

Automate
IBM Workload Deployer - is a hardware appliance that provides access to WebSphere virtual images and patterns for easily, quickly and repeatedly creating application environments that can be securely deployed and managed in a private cloud

IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere® - automates application deployment, configuration management, installation, and patching for the IBM WebSphere family of products, eliminating human errors, making deployment repeatable, and increasing speed of deployment.

IBM Service Delivery Manager - A pre-integrated software stack, deployed as set of virtual images that automate IT service deployment and provide resource monitoring and cost management in a cloud

Govern
IBM Rational Asset Manager implements a governance process and framework around topology fragments and automation workflows. It provides a definitive library to help organizations manage and control both the business and technical assets involved in software and systems delivery.