Last month at STAREAST 2012 Manoj Narayanan of Cognizant Technology Solutions gave a talk entitled ‘Testing in the DevOps World of Continuous Delivery’. He addressed many questions including the relationship between agile development and DevOps and how exactly an organization can make the switch. In her article, attendant Melanie Webb outlines the points targeted by Narayanan and offers useful insight into how moving to DevOps can speed deployment and improve ROI.

Agile development and DevOps

Agile development offers one path to continuous delivery as it brings developers and testers together and focuses on iterative development. Yet, according to Narayanan, “the ‘last mile problem’ still exists.” The wall separating deployment from the development and testing side encourages a long time between testing and deployment, and furthermore, testers do not necessarily have a systems administration skill set.

DevOps offers a potential solution to this integration challenge, bringing together development, testing and operations all on the same team, a team capable of playing all the different roles.

“Like Agile, this approach aims at getting features deployment ready at a high frequency. But where Agile primarily focuses on the functional and non-functional readiness of the application, DevOps takes it one step further and ensures the Operational and Business readiness as well,” Narayanan writes in his blog.

Narayanan noted several websites that are currently employing the DevOps model, sites like Facebook, Etsy, Orbitz, Groupon and Flickr. He explained that the frontrunners have tended to be Web 2.0 firms with strong reliance on eCommerce where fast changes and improved response time are paramount. He mentioned that Netflix is involved in this space as well, actually going with a NoOps approach.

When it comes to testing, the change to the DevOps environment must be gradual, and the talent involved will need to acquire new skills and adapt to new responsibilities. Testers need to gain knowledge in development languages— which fortunately is a bit easier with user-friendly tools like Python and Cucumber – and they also need to learn deployment processes and tools. Developers and systems administrators, on the other hand, must learn about test processes, design techniques and related tools.

Making the change to DevOps

Shifting to DevOps also makes continuous integration mandatory, according to Narayanan. He explained that in test-driven development we expect to fail first, but those errors inform the next cycle of development and testing. He emphasized that teams must have strong discipline around the single source code repository. The build process can be automated, resulting in a fast build. In order for all of these elements to work effectively, he highlighted the need for transparency; everyone on the team needs to know what is happening.

The process is also affected by the heavy reliance on innovative automation, which is embedded early in the lifecycle. “’Smart testing’ is dissolving the boundaries of traditional system and integration testing,” said Narayanan. Teams can now “leverage an optimal mix of automation across the lifecycle,” which includes automated unit testing, automated service layer testing and automated regression testing. Continuous integration is further facilitated by release management automation.

What do you think? Can DevOps be adapted without continuous integration?

Click here to read the full article by Melanie Webb

While application release automation is appealing, implementing the processes across you’re environments can be a daunting prospect. That’s why it is crucial to choose a solution that can easily integrate with your existing Build, CI, and ITSM platforms.

In our latest whitepaper ‘The Value of Nolio Application Release Automation in a Microsoft Environment’, deployment expert Phil Cherry discusses how Nolio ASAP can seamlessly integrate into an existing Microsoft based environment to deploy applications across the application delivery chain.

Microsoft has developed a number of effective solutions for application lifecycle management that are excellent for their original intended purposes. They do not, however, answer all of the requirements for true end-to-end deployments of complex, multi-tier applications. For this reason you may want to consider adopting a 3rd party application release automation solution such as Nolio ASAP, which can easily adapt to your ecosystem while enabling a completely automated deployment.

If you’re still not convinced that an outsider can help ease the deployment headache, here is a list of all the Microsoft programs that can directly communicate with Nolio ASAP:

1. TFS – Visual Studio Team Foundation
2. TFS Deployer
3. MSBuild
4. IIS WebDeploy
5. SCCM – System Center Configuration Manager
6. System Center Orchestrator
7. System Center App Controller
8. System Center Operations Manager
9. PowerShell
10. .Net
11. BizTalk
12. SQL Server

In addition, ASAP supports all of the major Windows Server versions, Windows 7, Vista and XP. Not convinced yet? Send me (Nili) an e-mail at nili@noliosoft.com and I’ll arrange for you to have a live demo.

“Nolio takes automation to the next level beyond code, server and systems management. Our end-to-end automation solution compliments the Microsoft solution set and many Nolio customers are using it with a combination of technologies. In complex Microsoft only environments, or in environments where it is one of multiple technologies used, Nolio provides consistency, standardization and ease of use to address the complexities of application service automation.” –Phil Cherry

Click here to download the whitepaper

Click here to learn more about our Microsoft Integrations

Click here to learn more about the our Solution

New Integrated Offering Streamlines Release Operations Across the Application Lifecycle

NEW ORLEANS, LA–(Marketwire – May 15, 2012) – Nolio — the leading provider of application release automation — today announced a new integration with ServiceNow, a leading provider of cloud-based services to automate enterprise IT operations. The integrated offering helps ServiceNow customers achieve continuous application deployment and reduce application release windows from hours or days down to minutes. Nolio and ServiceNow are working together to mitigate change risk and to minimize application service downtime.

ServiceNow helps transform enterprise IT by automating and standardizing business processes and consolidating IT across the global enterprise. The ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB) helps IT departments implement enterprise change management by tracking configuration item relationships, automatically defining IT services and automating IT processes.

Nolio ASAP reduces time-to-market and makes enterprise operations agile and ready for the cloud. Nolio ASAP provides release operations for all application resources (e.g. servers, configurations, data) as a unified system, providing greater flexibility, control, and visibility from an application perspective.

A leading global institutional asset management firm, with more than $500 billion in client assets under management, is already using the integration of ServiceNow and Nolio ASAP to automate application releases and optimize IT operations. The integration between ServiceNow software development lifecycle functionality and Nolio enables this customer’s IT team to cut release time down to minutes and execute the release process from within the ServiceNow platform, enabling the customer to become more agile, integrate across their IT organization, and achieve cost efficiencies.

IT operations staff can use the ServiceNow console integrated with Nolio ASAP to implement continuous and automated application deployment, enforce time windows for process execution, and tie development processes to configuration items in the CMDB. When the change management process begins, ServiceNow cloud services provide the necessary information to Nolio ASAP, which automatically executes the change, configuration and release operations. Nolio ASAP provides status information to the ServiceNow CMDB in real-time so the IT user has extensive, up-to-date visibility into the application release process.

Benefits of the integrated offering include:

• Advanced analytics, reports and dashboards showing how well services are performing, how they are being used and how much time and money is spent supporting them
• Tight automation of configuration management, change management and release operations
• Full application lifecycle support including development, test/QA, staging and production
• Support for continuous application deployment practices to meet the agility requirements of cloud services
• Application-centric orchestration of cloud infrastructure provisioning
• Support for physical, virtual and cloud environments — together in a single system of record

“Extending ServiceNow software development lifecycle functionality through Nolio ASAP provides a strong and unique solution to the market,” said Rob Luddy, ServiceNow VP of Business Development. “We will continue to execute on our commitment to transform IT by automating and standardizing business processes and consolidating IT across the global enterprise. By partnering with Nolio, we now have an end-to-end release operations platform to provide to our growing enterprise customer base.”

“We are excited to be working with ServiceNow to help our customers achieve the full benefits of a continuous application release operations platform for applications in the cloud,” said Doron Gerstel, CEO of Nolio. “By building upon the IT service automation offered by ServiceNow, application owners can use the Nolio ASAP release operations platform to manage the build and release of applications across all application phases, and achieve continuous releases with Zero Touch Deployment™. Our application-centric approach is beneficial to application owners who want continuous release cycles that are simple to manage, cloud-ready, and enable high levels of performance.”

On Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am EDT there will be a free webinar in which the integrated solution will be demonstrated. To register for this online event visit:http://go.noliosoft.com/ServiceNow-webinar.html.

Nolio will be presenting the integrated solution at the ServiceNow Knowledge12 Global IT Conference in New Orleans from May 15-17.

Useful Links

• ServiceNow Knowledge12 conference
• Nolio
• Follow Nolio on Twitter
• Nolio’s Blog

About Nolio
Nolio is the Zero Touch Deployment™ company. The Nolio ASAP™ release operations platform reduces time-to-market and makes enterprise operations cloud ready. Customers use Nolio ASAP to reduce deployment time from days to minutes and eliminate downtime. Many of the world’s leading enterprises rely on Nolio to automate application deployment, maintenance, remediation and recovery across the application lifecycle on physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. For more information visit www.noliosoft.com.

Service Now with Zero Touch Deployment

How to Integrate Service Now with Nolio – Video

Today marks the start of the Knowledge12 ServiceNow Global User Conference and we are excited to reveal the latest collaboration between Nolio and ServiceNow. Our new and improved integration has enabled leading global firms to achieve the dream – Zero Touch Deployment™!

Nolio ASAP enables the full integration of Zero Touch Deployment™ within the change management system of ServiceNow. All the platform’s process rules and data are automatically integrated with Nolio ASAP affording ServiceNow users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspects of their current application management system. This offers the best of both worlds; rapid and accurate deployments with complete auditability, visibility and control.

Adopters of these processes are benefiting from accelerated IT transformation by streamlining their release operations across the application lifecycle. Some of the results they are enjoying include:

1. Reduced Time-to-Market
2. Greater Flexibility and Agility
3. Visibility and Auditability
4. Advanced Analytics and Reporting
5. Support for Physical, Virtual and Cloud Environments
6. Full IT Governance and Compliance

“Extending ServiceNow software development life cycle functionality through Nolio ASAP provides a strong and unique solution to the market. We will continue to execute on our commitment to transform IT by automating and standardizing business processes and consolidating IT across the global enterprise. By partnering with Nolio, we now have an end-to-end release operations platform to provide to our fast-growing enterprise customer base.” – Rob Luddy, ServiceNow VP of Business Development.

Don’t forget to stop by booth 138 for the opportunity to learn more about Nolio’s new and improved integration with ServiceNow. See you in New Orleans at Knowledge12!

Want to learn more? Join us on Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am EST/4pm GMT for our live webinar ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ with Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron

Click here to read the full Press Release

Click here to register for our live webinar

All over the world we are witnessing major companies shift their business to the cloud. This comes with obvious benefits but also creates new bottlenecks. Productivity increases exponentially, pushing DevOps in to more automated release processes to keep up with the growth. I recently came across a blog by Martin Tantow that nicely explains how the application of cloud technologies actually helps to bring Dev and Ops together. Adopting DevOps and the cloud require some major changes, but the statistics don’t lie. It’s worth it!

Bridging the DevOps Divide by Leveraging Cloud Technologies

In today’s increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, business leaders are seeking ways to leverage strategies that optimize growth, improve agility, driver higher-value customer relationships and lead to increased revenue. Many see cloud as the answer. In fact, a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years. While cloud adoption is becoming more mainstream, organizations are also now moving beyond virtualization to higher value stages of cloud computing.

As a result, the rate at which new cloud-based applications and updates are being delivered is often faster than the IT operations team can manage – creating a divide between development and operation sides of the business. How can companies leverage cloud and increase business agility without sacrificing operation discipline, quality and governance?

Through continuous software delivery practices, companies can bridge the DevOps divide and leverage cloud technology in a strategic way that also sets themselves apart from the competition by enabling the creation of differentiated products and services quickly and efficiently — bringing products to market on time and under budget.

The numbers speak for themselves. Companies can expect to see:

1. 20% reduction in resource costs while increasing predictability of deployments through low touch and self-service applications
2. 40% more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication
3. 20% increase in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder of alignment development, test and ops
4. 5 times faster application build and deployment times and reduced errors by 93% in one client example

Cloud computing can fundamentally change the economics of business infrastructures and speed the delivery of innovative products and services – yet the DevOps divide cannot be overlooked if companies want to achieve the full potential of cloud.  As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realize agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around development, test and deployment operations to ensure coordination between development and operations.

What do you think about the DevOps divide? Will moving to the cloud help bridge the gap?

Click here to read the full article

Click here to download our free whitepaper ‘Does The Cloud Simplify Application Release Deployment’

I never thought of the DevOps movement having any sort of connection to community building. Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed reading the poignant comparisons offered by Venessa Paech in her self-titled blog. The overall message is that everyone will be more effective if they work together. I’ve only included an expert of the full blog and I highly recommend reading the whole thing, if for no other reason than to learn why no one celebrates ’Middle Aged White Man’ day.

DevOps and strategic community management alliances

I have many friends who work in ops or as developers, and as a community thinker, I’ve been fascinated by the DevOps movement for some time.

You can read more about it here, from the godfather of the movement, Patrick DeBois.

Here’s my take.

Two often warring tribes of the IT landscape, both with challenging jobs to pull off in a rapidly iterating world, are working to collaborate more constructively and understand each other a little better, to make their own daily grind less obstacle riddled, and cultivate a leaner, more united playground.

It’s an amazing piece of community building, happening on an international scale (and inspiring music videos).

It involves challenging assumptions and confronting boundaries and comfort zones, so it’s an uphill battle that has its critics. I see value –  understanding where you live in your IT ecosystem and a real empathy for your peers should lead you to better ways of working (and playing).

I’m no DevOps expert but over the years I’ve come to have enormous respect for the guys and gals that make our sure our communities are up and running.

Managing vast communities in many large enterprises and organisations, developers and sysadmins are among the folks I talk to the most on a regular basis. We’ll discuss risks and issues that will emerge within the community from the latest release of tools or features; we’ll comb through log files looking for problem IPs or users. I’ll work with them to develop new reports that tell me about critical community behaviours. And we’ll bond while having a whinge that no one seems to really understand the users of our website except us.

The truth, while it is undoubtedly strategic, community management is absolutely operational. In some respects, ops is a more natural paradigm for our work than marketing, which is designed to focus on the ideal rather than the reality.

And lets not forget that most of the earliest online community managers were system administrators – SysOps are our forefathers.

So here’s some highlights of my presentation, covering ’8 reasons #ops and #cmgmt should be strategic allies’.

Think of us as Social Ops.

Reason 1: Nobody understands what we do

Ops and community management folks struggle to articulate precisely what we do. It’s not that we can’t describe it. It’s that when we start, eyes generally respond by glazing over.

Most people, if they think of it at all, consider ops some sort of auto-magical mojo that either runs itself, or, involves aSheldon Cooper-type typing furiously while simultaneously kicking ass in an online game and bidding for geek memorabilia on eBay.

Many, when they think of community management, think of perky, relentlessly positive cheerleaders (somewhere between the casts of Bring it On and Glee) who sit around posting banalities and pretty pictures to various, largely superficial social networks encouraging people to buy more of brand x, and Be Happy!

The truth is actually less appealing, but way more interesting.

Reason 2: We both use metrics to tell important stories

If there’s one thing ops folk are known for, it’s their talent for measuring. Everything. They understand that numbers reveal secrets and a bigger picture that might otherwise be missed.

Despite our qualitative qualities, (good) community managers are also data nerds. We recognise the importance of fuzzy data, but we’re constantly striving to measure and report on numbers that tell the most relevant stories about our communities.

We understand that number of users is fundamentally meaningless, if there’s not a high ratio of replies to posts and viable sharing activity within and beyond the social system. We know that a lot of activity isn’t good in and of itself. It may point to aggressively vocal members, gaming of the system and a need for re-calibration.

We look at reported content volumes and how they inform the health of a community. And we understand just how important lurkers are.

Reason 3: We invest a lot of time running triage for others

Though we have our own priorities and strategic objectives, ops and community managers are technical and behavioural ‘fixers’.

We get stuff back online, diagnose problems and turn bad situtation around really well. So we’re the go-to guys and gals for this work. While we’re happy to help out, this can create the expectation that we’re the resident clean up crew for (avoidable) mistakes.

Here’s some examples from the community management world:

“The users hate the features we released. I know they didn’t ask for them, but make them love them!”

“We didn’t really consider what to do with this product after the first month. We’re working on other stuff now, can you make a plan for us?”

“We’ve installed a giant fly out advertisement over the top of sign in. Can you make sure that’s not an issue?”

Click here to read the full article

Using ServiceNow? Learn how you can achieve continuous application deployments with the latest ServiceNow and Nolio ASAP integration, minimizing application release windows from days and hours to just minutes!

‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ is a free educational webinar that will show you how full incorporation of Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ process with ServiceNow can minimize time-to-production, reduce bottlenecks, eliminate manual errors and ensure IT governance and compliance.

Following the success of our first ServiceNow webinar, Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron will showcase the unique capabilities of this bi-directional integration including:

1. Triggering fully automated release processes from within ServiceNow
2. Ensuring full IT governance and compliance with audited application releases
3. Managed application provisioning and application incremental releases

“Managing change or deployments in ServiceNow requires a series of time-consuming manual steps. Full integration with Nolio ASAP allows users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspect of their current application management system. Users will have rapid and accurate deployments along with complete auditability, visibility and control.” – Ron Gidron, Nolio Product Director

Following the presentation and live demo, all participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session with Ron.

The webinar will be held on May 23, 2012 at 11am EST / 4pm GMT.

Don’t forget to look for us at ServiceNow’s Knowledge12 this year in New Orleans. We’ll be at booth 138 to answer questions, give demos and unveil our latest ServiceNow and Zero Touch Deployment™ integration.

Click here to learn more about ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ and register for the event

Click here to view last year’s ‘Integrating Zero Touch Deployment™ with ServiceNow for Faster & Easier Application Releases’

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s ServiceNow Solution

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Nolio’s partner Serena recently sat down with APMdigest to discuss the challenges and advantages of DevOps. Keep reading to see what David Hurwitz, Senior VP of Marketing, has to say.

Q&A: Serena Talks About DevOps APM: For those who may not be familiar, what is DevOps?

DH: DevOps is an IT movement to deliver better communication, interaction and productivity between Development and Operations. The aim is to bring these two traditionally divided sides of the IT house closer together, bridging the divide between Development, which tends to concentrate on how features and functionality of the software are pushed forward, and Operations with its focus on reliable performance and delivery of these applications.

APM: DevOps seems like it should have been considered a good idea years ago. What has changed recently in our industry that has made DevOps such a hot topic today?

DH: The waning tolerance for application errors and the faster pace at which software/online services must be developed and delivered are already huge drivers to the introduction of new methodologies in Development and Operations. But to enable even faster hand-overs and meet these cost reduction targets, the intersection where Development meets Operations requires a re-think in its own right.

APM: What are the main barriers today that keep development and operations from working together?

DH: A primary challenge to DevOps is the way in which the handoff between Development and Operations is managed. Even though the trend is for companies to move to development automation, few can link all of the critical stages of the application delivery process.

However, Gartner reports that as software demands become more complex, and the teams working on these applications grow in number, the individual management practices for each stage of Development and Operations are being forced to evolve into more automated and linked up processes. So the issues surrounding handoff might actually slowly resolve themselves through sheer necessity.

APM: Does DevOps usually require a corporate culture change?

DH: It requires accountability on the part of developers to see their code through to successful production. Of course, that is only a reasonable proposition when they are given the necessary visibility and are able to depend on a fast and agile deployment process.

APM: How does a company go about starting a DevOps initiative? Is this something that can be homegrown or do they need a consultant?

DH: Many companies are finding that their existing Release Management and/or Change Advisory Board functions are morphing into DevOps initiatives. Thus the initiative can be homegrown. However, it requires automation to succeed at anything other than a micro level. The automation almost certainly has to come from outside, as the required process and deployment orchestration is considerable. The good news is that off-the-shelf release management solutions are now available that solve these problems in depth.

APM: What role can development teams play in application performance? What can they do to improve app performance in the development stage?

DH: It is not just application performance that dev teams need to concern themselves with. Rather, they need to think about how to architect their apps so they can be deployed easily, can be configured while in production, and so that there is traceability back into requirements. That said, DevOps thinking and staffing should provide developers with critical insight into application performance, thus guiding developers to the creation of performance enhancing changes, which can then be quickly deployed.

APM: As part of DevOps, should the operations team be providing more guidance to the developers?

DH: Sure, there should be more collaboration between Ops and Dev. Ops can provide “last mile” feedback to Dev about how architectural and design choices affect both deployment and runtime requirements.

APM: What basic advantages can a company gain if Dev and Ops work together more effectively?

DH: Speed and agility are the main benefits of Dev and Ops working together more effectively. This matters because most systems where DevOps is employed are mission-critical online services, e.g., they are how customers spend money with the company, or get customer care, or other fundamental mission enablement.

Because these systems are externally facing, they need to be revised regularly to keep ahead of the competition and customer expectation.

An enterprise that lacks the speed and agility of DevOps is bound to lose customers to faster moving competitors.

APM: What technologies support a DevOps approach?

DH: Release management technologies most directly support DevOps. These include the ability to automate the workflow around release planning and control, to securely manage a release package’s path to production, and to automate the actual deployment process. The first of these provides the visibility and confidence to operate at an accelerated cadence. The second ensures that release packages are known and pristine. The third slashes the labor and elapsed time for deployment, yielding tremendous cost, agility and quality benefits.

APM: Do you have any predictions on how DevOps will evolve in the near future?

DH: DevOps will become mainstream in all on-line business in the next year or two, albeit not necessarily with the title of DevOps. But the need for speed and agility required in online businesses means that the traditional silos of Dev and Ops must be brought together in organizations that expect to compete in the market.

IT management vendors are starting to compete for this important domain, leading to attractive automation solutions for DevOps practitioners.

Where do you think DevOps is headed? Share your thoughts with us.

Click here to learn more about David Hurwitz and to read the full article

Though I am always on the lookout for new insights into the DevOps/NoOps debate, I have to admit that I originally started reading this blog because of the references to Dr. Seuss and the movie ‘Groundhog Day’. What can I say, I’m a sucker for silly cultural references. Whatever the reason I began reading, this article by James Urquhart at gigaom.com is a great overview of the concepts that are driving so much discussion online.

OneOps, TwoOps, RedOps, BlueOps,
DevOps, NoOps, OldOps, NewOps.
This one relies on cooperation.
This one banks on automation.
Say! What a lot of ops there are.

- With sincere apologies to Dr. Suess

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@jamesurquhart) may have come across frequent recent discussions about new operations methods enabled by cloud computing. The most common terms in these discussions include DevOps and it’s controversial sibling, NoOps. While I think the practices behind these terms are critical to understand as the nature of IT operations shifts to meet new demands, the terms themselves are less than helpful.

So, what I thought I’d do today is walk you through key new operations concepts being adopted by the most cloud-savvy organizations I know, but without allowing terminology to distract the discussion. If I am successful, you’ll be able to look past the label and see the incredible value these new models bring to businesses and institutions of all sizes.

If I am unsuccessful …well, maybe we’ll keep having these conversations for another year—kind of like Groundhog Day.

How is cloud changing IT operations?

Understanding how cloud computing drives fundamental changes to the way IT works, rather than just becoming another way of expressing what has come before, doesn’t rest with its causes, but with its effects:

1. In the past, I’ve gone into some depth about how cloud computing takes IT from server-centric to application-centric operations.

2. I’ve also pointed out that the very nature of “who owns what” in the cloud reorganized operations activities along application, services and infrastructure lines.

3. Furthermore, I’ve also discussed how the highly interdependent, multi-owner nature of the cloud brings forward the science of complex adaptive systems.

In conjunction with these three, one other concept is critical to understand. What matters most to any business is the application of IT to business problems, and the ongoing support of those applications as long as they remain applicable to the business. The rest of IT exists in support of that.

What people not working closely with cloud computing fail to realize is that the application-centric nature of cloud operations shifts the very nature of operations away from infrastructure (as it has been since the mainframe) to, well, applications. (While I usuallyhate electric utility analogies for cloud computing, this is indeed similar to the shift of power generation from private generation to public utilities.)

If you are focusing on running applications in an environment you may or may not control, you focus on how to keep code running, data available, configuration viable and policy enforced. And, since the only thing you control is the code, data, configuration and policy, you have to start focusing on how to build performance and survivability into the application itself.

This was the first lesson learned by the Web 2.0 companies that embraced Amazon’s EC2 and similar services early on. To make an application run well at high scale in someone else’s data center, you have to make the application responsible for its own operational integrity. So, the practice of integrating development tools and people with operations tools and people was born (and became the first form of DevOps—embedding operations skills into development teams).

When skills just aren’t scalable enough

That sounds like a heck of a solution, right? Build applications that utilize the services they run on, and add some custom automation developed by people who understand server, network and storage performance, and how to keep IT running.

Except … there’s one little problem.

In any organization with more than a few applications to deploy and operate, the problem of scaling operations resources (people and tools) to meet that demand becomes a question of not only cost, but coordination across teams. At a small scale, that’s not a big deal. However as application teams grow in number, the problem of coordinating operations activities becomes increasingly difficult.

In an ironic twist, some early adopters of this model report utilization and contention issues when operations staff are embedded in development teams. The operations staff are faced with a dilemma: either selfishly protect the needs of their own projects, or work with other operations staff on other projects to find common ground—potentially impacting their own projects’ approaches or schedules.

The solution for some of the most bleeding-edge of these companies is interesting. Rather than force bureaucracy into the mix, they took a different tack: turn operations into a service—with an API. A platform service, or PaaS, to be exact.

In the PaaS model, developers utilize a service that embeds most of the operations automation for a class of applications right into the platform. You work with code and data, and configuration and most policy is handled for you (though you might provide metadata to influence both). The development team steps back from defining the specific operations logic for their applications, and instead trusts it to the platform service.

Because the developer does little day-to-day operations in the traditional sense, this approach is sometimes called NoOps. I personally despise that term.

It should also be noted that these platforms are essentially coding frameworks provided as a service, which can limit the class of applications to which they apply. So, it is unlikely that a single platform solution will meet the needs of an entire business.

Nonetheless, I think this is the (long-term) future of IT operations: relying on platform services to manage most of the day-to-day performance and survivability challenges a custom application faces. For those companies that are big enough, there may be a team that uses more of a merged DevOps team approach to deliver a platform service of their own. But the vast majority of companies will slowly move away from running infrastructure toward building and constantly tweaking applications.

The road will be far from easy

I say that knowing full well that many of you are reading this thinking “there is no way my organization is moving to a model like that anytime soon.” And I completely agree. Legacy applications weren’t built for this model, and most organizations aren’t set up to handle these tasks, either. The “traditional” siloed operations model will survive for a while at most companies.

But for how long is, in my opinion, uncertain. Take a look at Netflix, a poster child for pushing cloud operations boundaries. They believe very much in the platform services model.

The truth is, if you haven’t already started automating operations for your applications built for the cloud, you are not taking full advantage of the model. Start, at least, with that. However, consider that, as platform services (both public and private) mature, it may make more sense to build your next generation of applications on one.

Just don’t fool yourself. Regardless of which model you adopt, your company will always be doing some sort of operations. Don’t let the terminology fool you when it comes to that.

How do you think cloud is changing IT operations? Share your thoughts!

Click here to read the full article by James Urquhart

As April has drawn to a close, we have some exciting news to share with you. For starters, our new Whitepaper ‘The Value of Nolio Application Release Automation in a Microsoft Environment’ is now available online. Check out our monthly Newsletter to read about what we’ve been up to!

Also, don’t forget to look for us at Knowledge 12 – The ServiceNow Global User Conference in New Orleans and the Gartner Summit on IT Infrastructure and Operations in Orlando.

In this Issue New White Paper What’s New at Nolio Upcoming Events More About Nolio Upcoming Events

Knowledge 12 – ServiceNow Global User Conference

May 13-17, 2012
New Orleans, Louisiana

Knowledge 12 will be the point of collaboration for thousands of IT professionals representing the world’s most innovative companies and recognizable brands. Register today and join Nolio as we unveil our latest ServiceNow and Zero Touch Deployment™ integration.

View the Event

Gartner Summit: IT Infrastructure & Operations

June 5-7, 2012
Orlando, Florida

Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit provides strategic and tactical guidance as you navigate the most critical I&O trends and technologies impacting your enterprise today. Register for this summit and join Nolio as we launch the next generation Application Release Automation.

View the Event

More About Nolio Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Join us on LinkedIn Watch us on YouTube New Whitepaper The Value of Nolio Application Release Automation in a Microsoft Environment Our newest white paper, by deployment expert Phil Cherry, discusses the value that Nolio Application Release Automation can bring to a Microsoft environment. There are a number of components that need to be managed in a Microsoft application lifecycle and it can be confusing to understand the complexities of each.

In this white paper, you will learn how Nolio modernizes Microsoft applications deployments. Our end-to-end solution permits Zero Touch Deployment™ from development to production for applications based on Microsoft technologies.

Download the White Paper Today

What’s New at Nolio Nolio Talks BizTalk Using BizTalk? Are you frustrated with the command line utility not providing all the necessary actions for application deployment? And how about those pesky host instances? Well look no further! Our latest release will save you from the logistical nightmare that is BizTalk application deployments.

We are thrilled to share with you our new and improved BizTalk Action Pack with even more built-in actions and capabilities. Our latest out-of-the-box actions enable you to fully automate complex deployments for your Microsoft BizTalk applications and reduce errors, lowers costs, increase operational throughput and accelerate time-to-market.

Learn more about the BizTalk Action Pack

Nolio ASAP 4.0 Coming Soon Coming soon, we are excited to announce the upcoming release of the Nolio Application Service Automation Platform 4.0. This is the industry’s most comprehensive application deployment automation solution, specifically designed to meet the demanding needs of enterprises for a fully automated end-to-end release process.

Last week, hundreds signed on to listen to our live webinar ‘Automating WebSphere Application Deployments’. They learned how it is possible to fully automate end-to-end WebSphere application releases and now you can too!

We recorded the entire event so you can now watch and learn from this session at your convenience. Do you have friends or colleagues that you think would benefit from this webinar? Feel free to pass the link on to them.

This webinar demonstrated how you Nolio’s many out-of-the-box actions support your WebSphere application deployments within managed or clustered environments. Nolio’s Senior Systems Engineer, Scott Sumner, showed participants how to:

1. Automate WebSphere application deployments with easy to use visual building blocks
2. Execute Zero Touch Deployment™ of multi-tiered, WebSphere based applications
3. Automate post-deployment application validation in a WebSphere environment

Following the event, we held a lively question and answer session. To give you an idea of the quality content you will be receiving when you view this webinar, we’ve decided to highlight some of the questions asked by participants.

Q: Are you able to report on historical deployment durations and incident frequency?

A: Absolutely. Nolio automatically maintains a complete audit trail of every deployment process run that includes every detail about each deployment. The dashboard lets you monitor overall deployment statistics of all kinds

Q: Does Nolio support application configurations such as JNDI/JMS during deployment?

A: Yes, Nolio comes with out-of-the-box actions for JNDI and JMS. It also includes the ability to execute Jython and Jacl scripts.

Q: Is this solution limited to WebSphere only?

A: No! We have highlighted WebSphere as just one example of how this solution works. You can also use these actions with Weblogic, Tomcat, JBoss, .Net and many more.

If you didn’t manage to ask your question during the session or if you have additional questions, feel free to send me an e-mail at nili@noliosoft.com.

Click here to view the full presentation and learn the answers to more questions like these.

Using BizTalk? Are you frustrated with the command line utility not providing all the necessary actions for application deployment? And how about those pesky host instances? Well look no further! Our latest release will save you from the logistical nightmare that is BizTalk application deployments.

We are thrilled to announce our new and improved Action Pack with even more built-in actions and capabilities. Our latest out-of-the-box actions enable you to fully automate complex deployments for your Microsoft BizTalk applications allowing you and your company to reduce errors, lower costs, increase operational throughput and accelerate time-to-market.

With Nolio ASAP 3.3.3, you will be able to:

1. Achieve full control of applications, host instances, orchestrations and bindings
2. Fully automate all aspects of application deployment and configuration
3. Create reusable deployment processes across multiple versions
4. Reduce your dependency on command line and complex manual application deployments

“Using Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ platform can dramatically improve application deployments. We have a number of out-of-the-box actions that can seamlessly run across multiple servers regardless of version. Our platform for Zero Touch Deployment™ is fast, reliable, reusable and completely manageable. It will save everyone the time and headache caused by deploying BizTalk applications!” – Ron Gidron, Product Director, Nolio

The latest BizTalk Action Pack includes 6 main functionality groups, each containing a complete set of actions to simplify and automate your deployments:

1. Adapter Handler – Enables the creation and deletion of an adapter handler
2. Application – Allows for the manipulation of BizTalk applications
3. Binding – Enables manipulation of binding for assembly
4. Host Instances – Enables manipulation of BizTalk hosts and host instances
5. Orchestration – Perform orchestration actions
6. Policy – Ensure policy enforcement

Want to learn more? Check out our BizTalk Webinar on demand.

Click here to learn more about ASAP 3.3

For more information about this action pack and more, contact Nili at nili@noliosoft.com.

Knowledge 12, ServiceNow’s global user conference, will be the point of collaboration for thousands of IT professionals representing the world’s most innovative companies and recognizable brands. We are very excited to see what’s new and to unveil our latest ServiceNow action packs and Zero Touch Deployment™ integration.

From May 15th to the 17th, we will be hosting a booth at Knowledge 12 in New Orleans. Stop by our booth and learn how Nolio ASAP enables the full integration of Zero Touch Deployment™ within the change management system of ServiceNow. All the platform’s process rules and data are automatically integrated with Nolio ASAP affording ServiceNow users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspects of their current application management system. This offers the best of both worlds; rapid and accurate deployments with complete auditability, visibility and control!

Our Nolio reps will demonstrate how you can:

1. Link to a Zero Touch Deployment™ process from within ServiceNow
2. Schedule automated deployments
3. Control and manage automatic deployment processes
4. Maintain and integrate all existing rules and data
5. Automatically document all deployment processes
6. Ensure full control and visibility

We’d love to meet you to discuss your application deployment needs and share the successes that we’ve had with leading global clients like Tesco, SuperDerivatives, Atos and many more! Come find out how we can help your organization.

Click here to learn more about Knowledge 12 New Orleans

Kanban is a Japanese term meaning ‘visual board’. It is an approach that breaks that breaks the primary rule of today’s common agile practice: the fixed development time-box. In my search to understand kanban, I came across the Kanban Blog. This very informative site helped to simplify this new concept in application release management and explained how it can relieve those pesky bottlenecks.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a new technique for managing a software development process in a highly efficient way. Kanban underpins Toyota’s “just-in-time” (JIT) production system. Although producing software is a creative activity and therefore different to mass-producing cars, the underlying mechanism for managing the production line can still be applied.

A software development process can be thought of as a pipeline with feature requests entering one end and improved software emerging from the other end.

Inside the pipeline, there will be some kind of process which could range from an informal ad hoc process to a highly formal phased process. In this article, we’ll assume a simple phased process of: (1) analyse the requirements, (2) develop the code, and (3) test it works.

The Effect of Bottlenecks

A bottleneck in a pipeline restricts flow. The throughput of the pipeline as a whole is limited to the throughput of the bottleneck.

Using our development pipeline as an example: if the testers are only able to test 5 features per week whereas the developers and analysts have the capacity to produce 10 features per week, the throughput of the pipeline as a whole will only be 5 features per week because the testers are acting as a bottleneck.

If the analysts and developers aren’t aware that the testers are the bottleneck, then a backlog of work will begin to pile up in front of the testers.

The effect is that lead times go up. And, like warehouse stock, work sitting in the pipeline ties up investment, creates distance from the market, and drops in value as time goes by.

Inevitably, quality suffers. To keep up, the testers start to cut corners. The resulting bugs released into production cause problems for the users and waste future pipeline capacity.

If, on the other hand, we knew where the bottleneck was, we could redeploy resources to help relieve it. For example, the analysts could help with testing and the developers could work on test automation.

But how do we know where the bottleneck is in any given process? And what happens when it moves?

Kanban reveals bottlenecks dynamically

Kanban is incredibly simple, but at the same time incredibly powerful. In its simplest incarnation, a kanban system consists of a big board on the wall with cards or sticky notes placed in columns with numbers at the top.

Limiting work-in-progress reveals the bottlenecks so you can address them.

The cards represent work items as they flow through the development process represented by the columns. The numbers at the top of each column are limits on the number of cards allowed in each column.

The limits are the critical difference between a kanban board and any other visual storyboard. Limiting the amount of work-in-progress (WIP), at each step in the process, prevents overproduction and reveals bottlenecks dynamically so that you can address them before they get out of hand.

Worked Example

The board below shows a situation where the developers and analysts are being prevented from taking on any more work until the testers free up a slot and pull in the next work item. At this point the developers and analysts should be looking at ways they can help relieve the burden on the testers.

Notice that we’ve split some of the columns in two, to indicate items being worked on and those finished and ready to be pulled by the downsteam process. There are several different ways you can layout out the board. This is a fairly simple way. The limits at the top of the split columns cover both the “doing” and “done” columns.

Once the testers have finished testing a feature, they move the card and free up a slot in the “Test” column.

Now the empty slot in the “Test” column can be filled by one of the cards in the development “done” column. That frees up a slot under “Development” and the next card can be pulled from the “Analysis” column and so on.

What do you think of Kanban? Will it take over your agile practices? Can you implement Agile and Kanban together? Click here to read the full article

Mark your calendars! This June, Nolio staff will be attending the Gartner IT Summit to launch the next generation of Application Release Automation. From the 5th to the 7th of June 2012, we will be hosting a booth at the Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit in Orlando, Florida.

This summit will provide strategic and tactical guidance to navigate the most critical I&O trends and technologies impacting your enterprise today.

Stop by our booth learn how to:

1. Align operational productivity with the speed and efficiency of development and QA teams
2. Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates
3. Improve reliability within the deployment process, reduce custom scripting, configuration errors and downtime
4. Eradicate the need to manually manage process steps in spreadsheets and/or emails for application releases
5. Move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less-costly resources
6. Accelerate time to market by reducing deployment and configuration times

We’d love to meet you to discuss your application deployment needs and share the successes that we’ve had with leading global clients like Lombard Odier, SuperDerivatives, Atos and many more! Come find out how we can help your organization.

Click here to learn more about the Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit

Devops is a relatively new concept designed to bridge the gap between what has been dubbed the “Wall of Confusion” between development and operations teams. Devops integrates the teams together, ensuring interdependence, communication and joint collaboration. David Vellante nailed this concept on the head in a recent article he wrote for Wikibon. Read on to find out why you should make the switch to DevOps.

CIO’s: Time to Think DevOps

If you’re a CIO who cares about IT operations and wants things to run smoothly, it’s time to look into DevOps. At the simplest level, DevOps brings together the development and operations mindsets and organizes them around highly motivated teams, trained and well versed in both disciplines. The benefits are substantial and seen in the form of lower operational costs (cut by as much as 2/3rds), faster deployment and much greater flexibility to respond to business needs.

This was the premise put forth at the March 6, 2012 Wikibon Peer Incite by J. Wolfgang Goerlich, an IT practitioner in the financial services sector.

DevOps is a concept and IT management methodology that is designed to address the disconnects between operations and development. The problem is that operations people are focused on making sure IT infrastructure doesn’t go down. Indeed most system failures come from human error, not faulty machines– leading to a “don’t touch my storage network” mentality. Development people on the other hand are motivated and paid to push code, change with business needs and develop new function that helps differentiate their organizations and provide competitive advantage. To a development professional, change is good. To an operations person, change is scary bad.

The schism between development and operations becomes obvious when a new code release is ready to go into production. Development will “toss” the code over the fence to operations folks, who then are responsible for getting it deployed. In doing so they must configure the code to match the operational environment, which is designed never to go down and is almost certainly different than the development infrastructure. So even though the code release is “finished”, operations people must change it to really be ready for prime time. In doing so, they invariably uncover other bugs or change the code, which breaks something else. The operations people then have to call in the developers, who often get blamed for shipping faulty code. Of course the developers are frustrated, because it worked fine on their laptops. This process is duplicative and adds significant time to the deployment, increasing costs and decreasing business value.

DevOps is an organizational approach to break down the silos that have built up between development and operational teams. Key aspects of DevOps are:

1. IT staff are cross trained in both development and operations,
2. Teams are organized under the same structure, breaking down the barriers between development and operations,
3. Teams are measured and incentivized in a much more similar, if not identical manner,
4. The lifecycle of development and operations is unified,
5. Tool sets between development and operations are much more common if not identical.

A key outcome of DevOps is to automate as much as possible. Think “programmable infrastructure.”

What we heard on the Peer Incite call with Goerlich is that DevOps has completely transformed his IT organization by:

1. Accelerating application rationalization,
2. Speeding the consolidation of infrastructure,
3. Reducing FTE counts by 2/3rds,
4. Improving quality and speed of deployment,
5. Increasing morale.

The key challenges to successfully implementing DevOps are organizational and process, as these must change, and change is typically difficult. But the results of DevOps appear promising, and in these days of “do more faster with less”, the DevOps mindset is a trend that is your friend.

Have you made the switch to DevOps? What’s stopping you?

Click here to read the full article

Large enterprises that have moved toward a virtualized network infrastructure are now beginning to look at adopting private clouds, a trend that is moving from hype to actual deployments this year, says Tom Bittman, a VP and analyst with Gartner Research.

“Virtualization will be the major entry point to private clouds,’” he says. “Companies are virtualizing their servers, storage and networking, and [are] automating their processes; now it’s a natural step to make some of this available through self service.’”

In a Gartner report he penned, “Top Five Private Cloud Computing Trends, 2012,” Bittman says there will be 10 times more private cloud deployments in 2012 then there were the year before. The reason is that technologies from companies like Eucalyptus, VMware, BMC and HP are “maturing and emerging” now, he says.

And as large cloud providers like Amazon, Terremark and Rackspace are starting to offer private cloud options, there is more pressure on IT from the CIO and the CEO to deploy them, says Bittman. That is leading to another trend he sees: Enterprises are beginning to look to service providers to manage their private clouds, with varying degrees of privacy.

There are two different paradigms emerging in private cloud implementations: one that offers the benefits of hosting and another that can be deployed quickly and in a self-service model, Bittman says. This is leading to what he calls the middle ground, since enterprises have choices.

“We call it … blended offerings,” where one provider offers a private cloud and, with a physical database, integrates them together to avoid the issue of latency. Bittman also points out that “not everything fits on a virtual machine” and “not everything needs cloud. The blended approach is what customers want.” In fact, earlier this month Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon, launched its private cloud service, offering dedicated computing and storage, with an option to burst onto a public cloud.

Another trend Bittman has seen is enterprise interest in hybrid clouds. According to a poll at a recent Gartner data center conference, 47% of respondents want the ability to manage clouds on premises and off premises centrally by 2015. This is despite the fact that actual hybrid cloud usage is “really rare right now,” since the technology is not quite ready yet, he says.

Although the cloud management platform market is very immature, Bittman says, another trend is choice. The four categories that he sees forming are: virtualization platforms expanding “up,” traditional management vendors expanding “down,” open source-centered initiatives (most notably, OpenStack) and start-ups that are often focused on Amazon interoperability.

Another trend he sees is that enterprises have assumed the primary benefit of private cloud is lower costs. That perception is changing, Bittman says, and recent Gartner polls have shown the majority of large enterprises consider speed and agility to be the primary benefits. “Enterprises engaged in private cloud projects to reduce their costs will usually fail to meet objectives, as well as miss the mark on potential business benefits.” Even as adoption of private clouds increases this year, Bittman says enterprises need to do a reality check to determine where they make sense. Private clouds are a “very specific vertical trend” with a “pretty specific set of standards.”

Test environments are ideal for private clouds since they are done very quickly in a fairly standard way, he says. Private clouds should be deployed in situations where users have very standard requests that come in often and require speed, he adds.

“You have to ask users what they want and set [private clouds] up with them,” says Bittman. “It’s very important for IT and the business to be in lock-step here. When they’re not, they’re going to have problems.”

Nolio helps enterprises move applications to private and hybrid clouds with next generation application deployment automation.

This article was written by Esther Shein for Network Computing. The original post can be read here.

Continuous deployment aims to improve the quality of software, and to reduce the time taken to deliver it. When implemented with an automation solution like Nolio ASAP, it can give your company a real competitive advantage! This article, originally published on Stephen Smith’s blog, not only explains the process of continuous deployment but it also answers the question – What’s the hype?

Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is the notion that there is an automated process that will take code from the programmer, build a product, test it and then deploy it so that customers are running it immediately. If you’ve worked in software development, this can be a scary notion, since you’re lucky if programmers check in something that compiles, let alone something you want customers running without a lot of checks and balances. The key to continuous deployment is automating many manual processes that used to be very repetitive,  time consuming and error prone.

A key to successful continuous deployment is to always be challenging the status-quo. Don’t accept that something absolutely requires manual intervention. Work hard to eliminate all gate-keepers. In a way continuous deployment is a mindset and process where you are always looking to improve your automated processes, eliminate manual processes and get features to customers as soon as the programmer commits their changes. Part and parcel with this is breaking major functionality down into many small features that are all deployed as they are done. Breaking things down into very small pieces is the key to success and the key to speeding up development. Implementing things as one big piece tends to be hard, complex and leads to customer problems.

Building the Product

The programmer checking in code is the beginning of the continuous deployment process. If they have been successful in coding and testing a useful feature for your customers, then you would like this to be available to your customers in a very short order.

Now you have a build server running somewhere, perhaps being controlled by a continuous integration system such as Jenkins. The system on this server will be scanning source control for any committed changes, as soon as it sees one it will get it and build it and run all unit tests. Further it has a tree of all the dependencies in the system and will build all dependent modules and run their unit tests. If anything fails then a number of designated people will receive e-mails that the build is now failing. The person that checked in the changes will also be notified. It is now up to them to quickly fix things (the system can be configured to automatically roll back whatever they checked in, but usually the build system just keeps using the last good build).

The key point here is that you find out right away that you broke the build. This is in contrast to say doing nightly builds, where you don’t know until the next day, and there may have been many check-ins so it can be time consuming finding the real culprit. Plus it now interrupts whatever you were meant to do the next day.

Automated Processes to Deploy

Next we want to start deploying for various users to start playing with the system. So we have a build that has passed the unit tests and the automated longer running tests, now we start deploying for review by various departments. Usually this will mean automatic deployment to a server that various interested internal parties know how to access, perhaps with a common URL. Perhaps the build is deployed to various manual testing computers.

This step is actually optional. If your unit tests and other automated tests are good enough and if your development organization is confident enough and has a good track record then this step can be skipped and you can deploy directly to customers. Eliminating this step is a primary goal of many continuous development teams. Sometimes it’s just a matter of keeping one last human checkpoint in place, but there are many organizations that deploy to the production servers several times a day without needing this step. This is the fastest way to immediate customer feedback on what you are doing.

Deploy to Customers

Now the fun part, deploying to the production servers for customers. You want this to be the same process as described above so that you know it will work properly. Sometimes you might deploy to one server and have it start serving a set up customers to ensure all is well before allowing the build to go to all servers. Key to this is the ability to seamlessly update the database and have the ability to roll back the changes including the database changes if things go wrong.

Summary

As companies perfect this process it is becoming a competitive weapon where whoever does this best, innovates faster and leaves their competition in the dust.

Do you think your company would benefit from continuous deployment?

Click here to read the full article

Click here to learn more about deployment automation

Are you sick of deploying WebSphere applications? Frustrated with the tedious and time-consuming processes? How about working nights and weekends to get through those horrible error-prone releases? We were sick of it too and that’s why we came up with a solution to automate the whole process! Take advantage of our webinar at the end of the month and find out how you can simplify your application deployments!

On April 24th, Nolio’s Senior Systems Engineer Scott Sumner will explain how you can fully automate end-to-end WebSphere application releases and enable full synchronization between all of your application tiers.

After attending this exciting live event, you will know how to:

ü  Automate WebSphere application deployments with easy to use visual building blocks

ü  Execute Zero Touch Deployment™ of multi-tiered, WebSphere based applications

ü  Automate post-deployment application validation in a WebSphere environment

Scott will give a product demonstration on how Nolio’s many out-of-the-box actions support your WebSphere application deployments within managed or clustered environments.

At the end of the session, Scott will be joined by Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron for a live ‘Question and Answer’ session. This will give you the perfect opportunity to speak directly with our experts and get the most of out the event. Start thinking about the questions you’d like to ask today!

This webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT. Click here to register today.

Learn more about Zero Touch Deployment and the Nolio Solution.

About Scott Sumner

Scott has over 20 years of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Senior Systems Engineer at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in high performance and availability solutions, application performance monitoring and configuration and change management.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Are you sick of deploying WebSphere applications? Frustrated with the tedious and time-consuming processes? How about working nights and weekends to get through those horrible error-prone releases? We were sick of it too and that’s why we came up with a solution to automate the whole process! Take advantage of our webinar at the end of the month and find out how you can simplify your application deployments!

On April 24th, Nolio’s Senior Systems Engineer Scott Sumner will explain how you can fully automate end-to-end WebSphere application releases and enable full synchronization between all of your application tiers.

After attending this exciting live event, you will know how to:

1. Automate WebSphere application deployments with easy to use visual building blocks
2. Execute Zero Touch Deployment™ of multi-tiered, WebSphere based applications
3. Automate post-deployment application validation in a WebSphere environment

Scott will give a product demonstration on how Nolio’s many out-of-the-box actions support your WebSphere application deployments within managed or clustered environments.

At the end of the session, Scott will be joined by Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron for a live ‘Question and Answer’ session. This will give you the perfect opportunity to speak directly with our experts and get the most of out the event. Start thinking about the questions you’d like to ask today!

This webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT. Click here to register today.

Learn more about Zero Touch Deployment and the Nolio Solution.

About Scott Sumner

Scott has over 20 years of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Senior Systems Engineer at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in high performance and availability solutions, application performance monitoring and configuration and change management.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.