Hopefully many of you have read Scott Edwards recent post Igniting Innovation in the Application Economy. Scott does a great job of explaining how the success of today’s businesses hinge on state-of-the-art applications and digital services. He says “your software delivery cycle must become an accelerator, not an inhibitor, to bringing digital innovations to market”. He goes on to explain how CA Service Virtualization 8.0 is one of the key solutions that can help you do just that.
While CA Service Virtualization helps accelerate the development and testing process by enabling teams to develop in parallel, CA Release Automation takes you to the next step by automating and orchestrating your entire release and deployment process. Ensuring that you are spending your precious time and resources on what matters most, developing new innovative capabilities and services, instead of the manual, mundane tasks of managing the release process.
Cut your Release Cycles from Weeks to Minutes!
In November at CAWorld we announced CA Release Automation 5.5. An incredible new release aimed at our most demanding enterprise customers. And now, as of December 22, 2014, CA Release Automation 5.5 will be generally available. This latest release contains major enhancements and new features focused on improving collaboration, productivity, usability and enterprise performance and scalability. Our enterprise customers have achieved amazing results. We've seen application release cycles cut from over two weeks to a few minutes. Others have completely eliminated release errors resulting in huge savings in time and money while reducing resources required for application deployments from 15 people to 1. That translates to more time spent on innovation and less nights and weekends spent deploying code!
That is realizing the promise of DevOps and Continuous Delivery!
Here are just some of the features of this new release:
- New integration with Chef. No one else does this! You can now use Chef Cookbooks and Recipes directly within the release process. Establish configuration baselines from within RA and identify configuration drift before you deploy your application. Configure environments prior to deploying the application and compare configurations and versions of Cookbooks and Recipes. All within the Release Automation user interface.
- Shared Components. Establish and enforce best practices. Promotes collaboration between teams and accelerates the release development process by enabling deployment workflows and actions to be used across multiple applications and environments.
- Pipeline Overview. Automatically promote releases from one stage to the next – development through to production. Also available are new release planning capabilities and improved visibility across the entire deployment process.
- New Web-based UI. Brand new look and feel. More intuitive, more usability features, all to help you be more productive.
- Customized Dashboard & Reporting. Create your own views quickly and easily. See the information you want the way you want it. Have the information at your fingertips to identify and resolve bottlenecks.
We’ve Only Just Begun!
The combination of CA Release Automation and CA Service Virtualization promises to continue to deliver the utmost in DevOps innovation to help you and your organization thrive in today’s Application Economy.
Please register for the “What’s New in 5.5” Community webcast on January 7th to learn more directly from our product experts.
In the meantime, we wish all of you and your families a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!