In March 2014, we released the IBM Workload Automation as a service (WAaaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production).

In this blog I want to show you how using IBM UrbanCode Deploy we manage the environments dynamically provisioned in the SoftLayer cloud.

 

Problem

 

Each Workload Automation as a Service server environment is composed of two Virtual Machines. One Virtual Machine is the primary node and the other one is the secondary node. When a new server environment is needed, it is dynamically provisioned in the SoftLayer cloud.  These environments, in order to be updated by the Continuous Delivery process implemented with UrbanCode Deploy, have to be automatically discovered and associated to the correct target components/environments.

 

 

Solution

 

Our solution is to define a naming convention for the uDeploy agents and configure the uDeploy environments to include automatically the agents in the correct environments and associate the correct components to them.

The new WAaaS environments are generated from a cloud image template. Every time a new environment is created, it runs a script that configures the name of the uDeploy agent preinstalled on the template following a specific naming convention.

Creating the uDeploy environment definition using this agent naming pattern, uDeploy will automatically associate the agent to the correct uDeploy environment.

 

The naming convention used in our solution is:

                       

                        <ENV_TYPE>_<NODE_TYPE>_<ENV_ID>

 

    ENV_TYPE: Indicates the type of environment type (for example, PROD for Production)

    NODE_TYPE: Specifies whether this is a primary (P) or a secondary (S) node

    ENV_ID: Specifies a number (1 to n) that represents a particular offering instance

 

 

 

5 Steps to implement the solution in uDeploy

 

 

Step1 - Define a resource template: define a resource template of your environment. Define the agent prototypes with all the components that are associated with the specific resource type.

 

Step 2 - Define a top-level group resource: define a new Top-Level Group resource in Resources. This group is the root of the environment.

 

Step 3 - Define an application blueprint: in your uDeploy application, define a blueprint associated with the resource template defined in step 1

 

Step 4 - Create the application environment: create an application environment defining as base resource the one created at step 2 and as blueprint the one created at step 3.

 

Step 5 - Configure the environment to manage the agents: configure your environment to manage automatically the member. Define a regular expression based on the agent naming convention to include all the correct agents in the environment. For example, the regular expression PROD_P_.* will include in the environment all the agents that have as suffix name PROD_P_.

 

 

 

 

So, what do you think about? If you want more information see “Manage continuous delivery in the dynamic cloud environment using IBM UrbanCode Deploy”.

 

If you want to discuss more about any concerns you could have adopting IBM UrbanCode Deploy and in general about the WAaaS implementation of the Continuous Delivery, follow us on Twitter @GorgaIlaria and @FabioBarillari or leave a comment below. Thanks for your time!

 

Tags:  saas devops ibmtws cloud wa softlayer workloadautomation continuous-delivery udeploy