by: VMware Lead Applications Developer Jitendra Nath and VMware Lead DevOps Engineer Pervinder Sudan
With the onboarding of the Boomi-as-an-iPaaS* solution, the number of heterogeneous applications leveraging VMware IT’s Boomi platform—both on-premise and in the cloud—increased exponentially. There was a vital need for a single-entry point where developers could onboard their integrations and move code across the environments.
Since the number of developers and projects were spread across VMware, it was a big challenge from the platform perspective to support individual teams. This fact hit home when our team needed to automate our Boomi processes deployments to VMware continuous integration/continuous deliver (CI/CD) environments with existing heterogeneous application deployments—and without investing in third-party software and licenses. A further challenge was a pressing requirement for centralized Boomi platform monitoring to ensure the stability and high availability of the environment.
The solution was to build a custom dashboard using VMware’s open source Clarity Design System. The system allows quick and simple configuration/deployment of Boomi process components into the Boomi platform environment hosted on cloud. It also provides a hassle-free, end-to-end automated deployment pipeline that helps deploy quicker and more effectively. Plus, VMware vRealize® Log Insight™ (vRLI) enables us to easily transfer Boomi runtime logs for better centralized operational monitoring.
A powerful, multi-purpose interface
The comprehensive user interface (UI) is dynamic enough to accept updates made to any Boomi process packaged component version. The metadata of the Configuration (i.e., Environments Extension property) is stored in our central DevOps repository, and this helps maintain a history of changes. The UI is also integrated with VMware vRealize® Code Stream™ (vRCS), which is used to deploy the Boomi packages and Extension property to different CI/CD Boomi Environments. vRCS uses metadata extraction from the Boomi platform, DevOps central repository and Boomi AtomSphere admin APIs** to deploy the applications across the environment.
A portal and a sequenced process
The cloud availability of Boomi process deployment metadata meant our team had to radically reduce manual deployment functions across CI/CD environments. The answer was to create an IT DevOps portal via the Clarity Design System*** and vRCS that enabled seamless component deployments.
The portal features integration with project tracking tools and config stores. It also integrates with Boomi Platform AtomSphere Admin APIs for streamlined deployment of user story creation, Blueprint, as well as to CI/CD and production.
The sequence is as follows:
User story status changed by developer to waiting for deployment
Developer creates package in Boomi for the components required for the user story
Using the DevOps portal, the developer creates a Blueprint
for the Boomi user story and component
The developer deploys the packaged component to CI/CD or
automatically via the Blueprint deployment schedules
The Boomi deployment pipeline is integrated with the vRCS that automates end-to-end component lifecycle deployment—in conjunction with AtomSphere admin APIs
Finally, centralized log monitoring for the Boomi container log
and shared web server log using vRLI is also enabled
Great expectations—fulfilled
Overall, our team has deployed 13,000+ CI, nearly 4,000 CD, and 900+ production applications. As the number of applications and development team grew, the platform team was overwhelmed with the effort required to support developers on day-to-day basis—and had little time to focus on the strategic activities. Automation helped to significantly reduce these manual efforts and made all our deployments no-touch in nature.
In addition, we have two platform accounts with a combined 21 different environments. A team member creates the configuration file with encrypted passwords for different connectors and applications per environment. These, in turn, are decrypted by vRCS at runtime and applied on the environment extensions. This process ensures applications requiring Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance can be seamlessly onboarded as quickly as their non-SOX equivalents.
The developer encrypts passwords and creates an extension Json for deployment through vRCS
*Integrated Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
***Clarity Design System open source repository can be found here
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