With Software Delivery at the enterprise level involving the use of so many tools, automation of isolated processes is not enough. Software delivery teams need orchestration across the delivery chain—an automator of automators—that allows them to manage their DevOps tools and processes and promote applications through the release pipeline.

That’s where Application Release Orchestration (ARO) comes in, overseeing the myriad of tools and orchestrating the overall release pipeline, from planning to Production. Application release Orchestration frameworks provide hooks into all the products and services that make up the application development and release process. By doing so, ARO platforms allow IT teams to integrate, orchestrate, automate, and get visibility into the entire application development process from end to end to drive development of higher-quality applications faster than ever before.

Of course, as software delivery continues to become paramount to the success of every part of an organization’s business, the ARO market is starting to get a little more crowded, with multiple tools promising to provide end-to-end Continuous Delivery.

At XebiaLabs, we’re 100% focused on ARO. Our strategy is to make software delivery easy for both technical and business users, enabling them to adopt, implement, integrate, and use our ARO solution to quickly show positive results.

Let’s take a look at the major features that separate XebiaLabs from the ARO pack.

End-to-end DevOps Toolchain Orchestration

While some of the crucial capabilities for accelerating software delivery in the enterprise may be available in the various tools on the market, only XebiaLabs provides a platform that connects the dots across the entire software delivery pipeline––integrating tools and data, enabling complete automation and orchestration, and delivering the intelligent insight companies need to maximize value.

Enterprise teams will continue to use the best of breed tools they love to do things like Continuous Integration and Change Management. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform is designed to connect and orchestrate the various tools used in the DevOps pipeline without the need for ad-hoc scripting, helping teams scale for true end-to-end Continuous Delivery.

XebiaLabs plugins support all major application servers, middleware, cloud, containers, databases, security tools, and other tools commonly found in the DevOps ecosystem, from Amazon Web Services to ServiceNow. Here are a few examples of how XebiaLabs can extend the functionality of your most critical DevOps tools.

• Extensible integrations with ServiceNow, Remedy, and Jira, enable users to incorporate things like approval requests and service tickets into their release processes.
• Full integrations with various container management tools, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker, enable users to orchestrate and automate their software delivery pipelines and easily migrate to a fully containerized environment.
• Integrations with the most common security operations management tools––Fortify, SonarQube, Checkmarx, Black Duck––provide a foundation for users to incorporate security testing earlier in the release pipeline.

You can check out the full list for integrations here.

Cloud-Agnostic Technology

Smaller organizations can jump right in with a public cloud vendor and package their software in a way that lets them easily take advantage of the service’s capabilities. Larger enterprise environments, with multiple departments and teams, rarely have this luxury. These environments tend to include a mix of on-premise legacy infrastructures and hybrid clouds, which only heightens the need for automated and orchestrated processes.

To improve and accelerate software delivery, DevOps practices need to span the entire software delivery value stream. But this can be a tall order when using a tool that is configured to work with a specific cloud service. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform integrates seamlessly with many popular public and hybrid cloud services, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Teams can include cloud-based infrastructure as part of a code-to-Production, automated release pipeline that is driven by standardized processes and that incorporates all required controls.

Scalability

In addition to automation and standardization, changing the culture of your software delivery teams is key to scaling DevOps. How people work together, and how each person views their role and their relationships with others in the delivery pipeline is as important as the tools they’re using.

At XebiaLabs we recognize the importance of people in software delivery. As such, we offer multiple technical and organizational approaches to scaling out XebiaLabs across the enterprise.

You can host a central XebiaLabs DevOps Platform instance that allows you to manage departmental instances. And as the team that worked on the central instance integrates new tooling, the functionality can be pushed out to the departmental instances. This is a stark contrast to a tool that requires you to install proprietary agents. With those tools, instead of giving your teams controlled freedom, you get stuck with longer setups, more maintenance, audit concerns, and more security risks to your infrastructure.

End-to-End Visibility

To automate the steps needed to build and deliver code, developers create pipelines. While that’s great for the development team, what about less technical team members who still need to quickly visualize and evaluate release information? XebiaLabs’ custom dashboards and intelligent analytics provide visibility and reporting to highlight release status and risk for all types of users, from technical to more business-oriented.

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The Reporting dashboard gives you intelligent analytics to assist in project planning––average release duration, average task duration, number of completed releases, longest task, release efficiency, longest releases, and number of releases per month.

The Deployment dashboard shows which apps are deployed to which environments and what activity has occurred over a given period of time.

The Value Stream report gives you a value stream analysis for each completed release.

The Release Overview dashboard assesses releases based on a risk score that looks at failed or retried tasks, flags, and any overdue phases or tasks to show you which releases are likely to fail as they’re executing.

The Release Forecast view uses predictive analytics-based anomaly detection based on machine learning capabilities to give you the ability to pinpoint specific bottlenecks in the release process to drive continuous improvement.

Try it out

If you’re interested in seeing how both your business and technical teams can benefit from an ARO platform that gives them intelligence, automation, and control over software delivery, try the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform today for free.

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