It’s proving to be an Agile life for us (Part 2)
I know what you’re thinking, “What does source code have to do with sea life?”. The answer is an “Octopus”, more correctly Octopus Deployment server. Octopus is the name of the release management automation tool that we have selected to power our continuous integration process.
Why does this matter? Well for some time now we have been using a set of manual processes that allow us to deploy new or updated applications to the various life-cycles stages. So between Testing, Staging and Production environments, however these manual processes are no longer adequate for the scale of projects we are undertaking they also allow for errors to creep in. More importantly they are not completely auditable relying on developers to complete manual logs or paperwork detailing the tasks being undertaken.
The new automated process takes code from the source repositories, runs automated tests, follows the deployment process plan (configurable by application) and then checks the deployment has completed and the application is still in a running state. Various other steps can be added such as authorisation, notifications and configuration depending on the environment being deployed to.
The effort involved in implementing this process automation is not insignificant but we believe that it will bring real benefits to our team and to the level of service we can provide our clients in the future. The implementation of Octopus Deployment Server is cornerstone of our commitment to our ongoing ISO 9001 certification project (more on this in future posts), bringing with it not only stronger process management but auditable quality control. Implementation and testing should be completed by the end of the month and will be used on some large scale projects once completed.
To find out how we can use this process to deploy your next application in a secure and auditable way, get in touch and learn more.
Related posts
