CA Release Automation is an enterprise-class, continuous delivery solution that automates complex, multi-tier release deployments through orchestration and promotion of applications from development through production.
CA Release Automation speeds up application release cycles, and improves business and operational agility. It reduces errors, and achieves higher quality releases by simplifying and standardizing application release processes. Finally, it reduces costs of application deployments, and promotes collaboration and alignment between Development and Operations
DBmaestro together with CA Release Automation ensures your database is included in your DevOps and continuous delivery processes. Covering everything from development best practices to database impact analysis based deployment automation – your database can now be handled with the same standards you use for your application code.
Using Your CA Release Automation Tool
We’re going to show you how to use your CA Release Automation tool to best benefit your company using DBmaestro DevOps Platform.
Once the action pack is properly installed and loaded, you can assign actions to your release processes.
Under the designer in the process design, you can choose the components tab to start adding actions available from DBmaestro TeamWork.
If you choose the command “Add an Action”, you can see the available commands by expanding the DBmaestro TeamWork folder. The actions are grouped by “simple” and “advanced” actions. The distinction between the actions gives DBmaestro’s DevOps Platform users addition flexibility and control into their automation and design process.
When an action is selected, the input fields are displayed to provide information to the actions being performed. The input depends on the selected act and references information from the DBmaestro TeamWork Pipeline Builder.
The DBmaestro Pipeline Builder is a visual resource enabling you to package, verify, deploy, and promote database changes just as you would with your application code allowing you to build and visualize a full delivery pipeline. It defines mapping relevant to your environment.
A Unique Automation Deployment Plan Per Environment
Each pipeline project represents a unique automation deployment plan for a predefined environment and relationships between those environments, enabling a quick, one-time design automation flow mapping for later usage in build and deploy processes.
The build latest version action asks for details such as the pipeline name, the environment name, and a new label name. Continue to add the actions needed to define the deployment processes for the database changes.
Change Validation
Here is an example of a flow to validate and deploy the database changes:
The flow starts by building the latest version of the database change. Then it runs a validation to confirm there is no configuration drift in the target and then deploys the change to the target environment.
Circling Back to the Why of the Matter
As has been demonstrated, the release automation helps you automate your database deployments into your continuous delivery pipeline.
It helps IT operations, development teams and application owners to speed up application release cycles, and improve business and operational agility, reduce errors, and achieve higher quality releases by simplifying and standardizing application release processes and finally, to reduce costs of application deployments, and promote collaboration and alignment between Development and Operations.
In other words, this partnership between DBmaestro and CA allows for DevOps for the database – and throughout the entire application development process.
