Achieving Smooth Release Deployment in Today's Data Centers

Achieving Smooth Release Deployment in Today's Data Centers

There are common mistakes many organizations make when they deploy applications. The obvious ones usually center on performance, security and implementing tools for monitoring environments. But there are other common issues, centered around changes, that occur as well.

Identifying changes quickly before they can impact application performance, reduces the risks to business continuity. This encompasses validating changes in application deployments and software deployments, and knowing that they were implemented correctly, thus avoiding costly downtime.

Release management, application deployment and software deployment of business services, all this includes staying on top of the configuration of all the components in the service being deployed.

The issues associated with application deployment are very pressing. With IT organizations responsible for managing the stability of environments, today's organizations are under more and more pressure to make releases happen faster, at an accelerated pace, and achieve successful releases.

Frequency In Which Environment Changes Occur

Automation complicates the process. When a problem occurs, where do you look for the root cause? You also have to keep in mind the rapid frequency in which environment changes occur. The more changes that occur, the more likely those changes will impact the stability of the environment. New releases and deployments push optimally configured environments into being environments that have increased risks of failure. The degree to which a system has diverged from a standardized or optimal state is often referred to as its configuration drift. The greater the configuration drift, the more likely there will be a business impacting environmental failure and the more difficult it is to identify the cause.

One-Off Changes

So the question is how will you manage the one-off change or changes that do not follow a determined policy? Also, how can you discover and identify changes that have occurred in an environment? It's relatively simple to correct a change in one specific system. However, how can you validate all of your systems' configurations, and then update or correct any ad-hoc changes that were made? The problem is complex, and difficult to resolve.

The Complexity of Automated Deployment Tools and Lack of Full Automation

Despite having automated tools that were designed to streamline the release effort, automated application deployment tools don't act completely automatically. An operator is required for configuring these tools, ensuring that the results will be error-free. Software development faces similar circumstances, where bugs can creep over the course creating code. Likewise, bugs can enter your 'automated' application deployment system, even after the release has been deployed. Even though the application may have initially been released to the test environment, followed by release to production; this process won't guarantee consistency in the releases. There are many different kinds of configurations and dependencies specific to each of these environments.

Since these tools can contain such errors, release validation plays a crucial role in stability.

Failing To Plan For Changes In Application Performance In The Cloud

Due to differences between performance levels from the cloud to the traditional data center, application deployment in a cloud may show performance discrepancies. When considering various configurations for application performance, IT Ops usually focus on CPU power, memory, disk storage, etc., and in the traditional data center, there is considerably less applications running on a server. In fact, the configurations of the application are synched to the server, so that the physical server monitoring tools end up showing acceptable performance levels. Article sponsored by Continuous deployment Jenkins and  Jenkins deployment automation