Collaborative development and operations

DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations so that they can work collaboratively, rather than in silos. This is a higher level of collaboration than the typical team-level collaboration. Development and operations staff must manage constantly changing combinations of applications and target environments. To manage and automate deployment, development and operations staff collaborate on a number of assets, including the following:

Application requirement

A model of the environment, including specific application and database servers, required for an application to run correctly.

Deployment environment

A model of an available environment provided by operations staff. In practice, there might be a wide variety of deployment environments.

Deployment plan

A verified binding of application requirements to a deployment environment.

Automation plan

A script that automatically deploys an application to a specific environment, as described by the deployment plan.

Planning and automating the deployment of an application requires capabilities beyond standard source control management. For example, developers must be notified when target environments change or are decommissioned. Operations staff must be able to perform impact analysis, for example to determine the effect of upgrading all database servers to a newer version. At a glance, developers, testers, and IT staff must be able to see which enterprise archives are deployed where, and in what environment, including application and database server types and versions, and IP addresses.

In the DevOps scenario, Rational Asset Manager is not just a storehouse for software packages and models of application requirements and deployment environments. Rational Asset Manager can govern and track the outputs of the other tools, such as Rational Software Architect, Rational Team Concert™, and Rational Automation Framework which are used to create models, to track work items and defects, and to deploy environments. By storing all the outputs as assets, you can determine who owns a particular asset, discuss the asset in the forums, or rate the asset. In addition to this collateral information, the relationships between a particular application and all aspects of how the application has been created and deployed (component parts used, deployed IP address, application server version, database server version, and so on) are available and searchable. You can, for example, query to find all applications deployed to WebSphere® Application Server Version 7.0, to determine the impact of upgrading WebSphere Application Server to a newer version.

To learn more about using Rational Asset Manager in a collaborative development and operations scenario, see the Rational Asset Manager guidelines for deployment planning white paper.

You can use Rational Asset Manager to enable the development lifecycle and make deliverables available in a cloud environment. For more information, see Rational Asset Manager and the cloud.

For an example of automating deployment using Rational Asset Manager and Rational Software Architect, see Example: Including assets in automated tasks in the Rational Software Architect information center.