by Rich Bourdeau
VMware announces the availability of vRealize™ Code Stream™ release automation and continuous delivery software
Code Stream is a new VMware product targeted at organizations that use agile development approaches and that want to automate a manual release process. It allows developers and operations teams to release software more frequently, more efficiently, and at lower operational risk, all the while leveraging their existing investments in developer and operations tools.
Code Stream enables continuous delivery by automating the tasks required to build, deploy, and test at each stage in the release delivery pipeline including gating rules between stages.
To automate the delivery Code Stream integrates with and orchestrates the release process by leveraging existing software development lifecycle tools.
Code Stream has three core functional modules:
- Pipeline Automation – Model any release process for any kind of software
Code Stream allows application release teams to model any kind of release process for any kind of application from simple, single node, on premise applications to complex, multi-tiered, cloud-based or hybrid next-gen applications. Pipeline models configure the workflow tasks and governance policies used to build, deploy and test the software at each stage in the delivery process as well as the gating rules between stages. An example of a pipeline is shown below.
Furthermore, as organizations move from waterfall to agile to DevOps and true continuous delivery, Code Stream adapts to an organization’s evolving release automation maturity. Code Stream allows release teams to model manual tasks and approvals, or it can automatically promote builds from one stage to the next based on test results or pre-defined rules. So as organizations’ release processes mature, Code Stream pipeline templates can be modified from partial to full-automation to evolve with them.
- Artifact Management – Assure the right artifact versions for each release
As organizations move to continuous delivery with more frequent releases, keeping track of artifacts becomes increasingly more important. Code Stream supports the modeling and resolution of artifacts so that the right artifact versions are automatically retrieved when deploying a particular build version of an application. This means organizations can easily control, store and manage binary artifacts throughout the software release cycle, and ensure that the right artifact version is deployed every time.
- Release Dashboard – Get full visibility into your release process
As the pace of software releases accelerate it becomes increasingly more important but also more difficult for organizations to track which applications, configurations and artifacts are deployed on the machines at various stages in the pipeline. Code Stream provides a summary view of all active pipelines and an end-to-end view of each pipeline. Status displays help identify problems so that they can be addressed quickly. This unified view of the release status across various environments empowers collaboration between teams to assure higher quality and faster delivery of new software releases.
Flexible provisioning and software configuration options
For customers who already use vRealize Automation, Code Stream offers tight integration with vRealize Automation. When deployed together, the combined solution offers a single platform to handle service provisioning AND accelerate application delivery lifecycle. vRealize Automation’s governance policies and automated delivery insure that each group in the application delivery pipeline receives the right size application in the right configuration for the task needed to be performed.
While delivering increased value when deployed with vRealize Automation, Code Stream does not dictate nor require a particular provisioning solution. Users are free to model pipelines that integrate with any vendor’s provisioning or configuration management solution, or even plain old scripts.
Learn More
Here are some additional resources to help you learn more about vRealize Code Stream
