vRealize Code Stream – Leveraging Existing Release Automation Tools and Processes

by Rich Bourdeau

Regardless if you are looking to implement agile development, continuous Integration and continuous delivery process or just need looking at ways to delivery releases faster and more reliable you will need to explore how you can improve the efficiency of some of your siloed, manual automation processes.

vRealize™ Code Stream™ helps organizations that have a Continuous Delivery or DevOps initiatives become more productive. It is an application release automation solution that allows developers and operations teams to release software more frequently and efficiently, all the while leveraging their investments in existing developer and operations tools. Code Stream integrates with continuous integration, test and repository solutions to push new software automatically from development and test to staging and production environments, saving the time and errors typically associated with manual procedures and hand-offs.

How Code Stream Release Automation Works

In a release delivery process, after development checks in their enhancements or new features, several additional groups need to test, stage and accept the release prior to putting it into production. Today this is largely accomplished using siloed processes with a collection of tools that may or may not be consistent across groups. Not only does the process to deploy and test at each stage take too long, coordination and consistency at each stage also suffers.

Code Stream helps add order, speed and reliability to the release process

Automating the different tasks needed to provision, deploy, test, monitor, and decommission the software targeted for a specific release.
Assure standardized configurations, by coordinating the artifacts and process across each release delivery stage
Provides governance and control across the end to end process ensuring process consistency at each phase in the delivery pipeline
Leveraging existing tools and processes to minimize disruption and leverage prior investments

This last point is the key to understanding how Code Stream automates and provides governance and control over the release delivery process. It is does not replace your existing software development lifecycle tools and process. Rather, whenever possible, it leverages and works with your collection of independent multi-vendor tools to orchestrate the end to end software delivery process, track artifacts to assure consistency across all stage in the release delivery pipeline.