Continuous Delivery with Electric Cloud
Solving Continuous Delivery Challenges for Enterprise Development
Continuous Delivery is quickly becoming the standard practice for software development automation. Unlike basic Continuous Integration (CI), which suggests that every source code check-in to the SCM system should be followed by a build and possibly some unit tests to verify the validity of the change, Continuous Delivery goes beyond CI by implementing automated builds, tests (both unit and system level), and deployments to QA environments. This solution provides a much better measure of quality because it subjects the source code change to the full set of automated tests and optionally publishes the change for downstream manual testing by QA. When software organizations have complex development environments including characteristics such as multiple teams, projects, platforms, tools, and methodologies, Continuous Delivery becomes exponentially difficult and resource-intensive to implement. For effective CD in an enterprise environment you need to ensure that your solution is:
- Scalable (to support any size project, large number of users, workflow complexity, etc.)
- Turnkey (does not require creation/maintenance of extensive build-test-deploy scripts)
- Automated (invoke processes with a single click)
- Efficient (less than 30 minutes for a complete build-test-deploy process including environment provisioning)
While open source "CI servers" are available, they fail to deliver Continuous Delivery in an enterprise setting.
Read about the challenges of enterprise Continuous Integration, and when to consider a move from open source to a commercial Continuous Delivery solution. Or view a demonstration of ElectricCommander and Perforce integrated to automate a seamless process.
| Continuous Integration Challenge |
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Impact | |
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Electric Cloud Solution |
| Multiple CI servers across the organization | |
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Time spent on administration and maintenance; inability to share or reuse scripts | |
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Implement ElectricCommander as a single, centralized build-test-deploy service across the organization |
| Build-Test-Deploy processes require manual intervention | |
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ntegrating often will overwhelm a manual process | |
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Automate the entire build-test-deploy process with ElectricCommander |
| Too many broken builds | |
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Broken integration builds can be a roadblock to Continuous Delivery and discourage developers from frequent check-ins | |
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Enable developer "preflight" builds and tests, across all platforms, before committing code to the integration branch |
| Slow build-test-deploy cycles (due to large volume of tasks or long running tasks) | |
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Long processes limit the number of iterations possible in a day | |
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Run jobs or individual steps in parallel across multiple servers to dramatically increase throughput |
