uRelease™: An Enterprise Release Management and Coordination Platform
uRelease is a release management and coordination platform that manages the release of complex interdependent applications, infrastructure changes, and simultaneous deployments of multiple applications. uRelease lets you plan, execute, and track a release through every stage of the lifecycle model. Based on lessons learned from working with our customers, uRelease reduces errors, while making large releases faster and more agile.
uRelease allows you to:
Manage environments efficiently
The Environment Management capabilities within uRelease make it easier to allocate environments to phases in a release for development and testing, providing better visibility and control for efficient environment utilization.
Track both the application and infrastructure changes in the release
During a release, application changes are typically managed with a different set of tools than infrastructure. This presents a visibility and a tracking problem. uRelease uses a holistic view of releases that combines the coordination and management of application changes with infrastructure changes to provide a ‘single pane of glass’ view, where you can see the progress of the entire release.
Orchestrate the release of interdependent applications using application-centric and team-centric processes
uRelease‘s flexibility to deploy through application-centric deployment processes in lower environments and team-centric processes in production environments accommodates environmental differences and allows the tool to adapt to different process requirements.
For example, in lower environments, the database and middleware changes for an application can be deployed together before the next application. In production, rather than using an application-centric process, a team-centric approach is used where by the database team deploys DB changes across all applications before the middleware team deploys their changes across all applications.
Collaborate focusing on the release train methodology
Collecting all the interdependent applications that make up a release is a challenging process. During regular releases, if an application is not ready for production, the release manager will have to look through multiple documents to discover how that application affects the rest of the release. uRelease allows users to record deployment information and propagate it to later environments, allowing the deployment to stay on schedule.
How uRelease works with uDeploy
Extending upon UrbanCode‘s DevOps platform, uRelease works alongside uDeploy to provide an extra layer of release management that goes beyond automated application deployments.
uRelease is a release-centric tool that coordinates the release of multiple applications and keeps track of both infrastructure and application changes. uDeploy, UrbanCode‘s deployment automation tool, is an application-centric tool that handles the automated deployment of multi-tiered single applications. uRelease is not an automation tool. Instead, uRelease works with uDeploy to deploy multiple applications in a release.
uRelease complements uDeploy‘s management of application environments for a single application, by providing management of the application and infrastructure.
uRelease and uDeploy both have gates and approvals to maintain quality. uDeploy uses gates and approvals at the application level, and uRelease uses them for the entire release.
uRelease integrates with uDeploy to manage multiple applications and changes outside the scope of application deployment automation. uRelease orchestrates the changes across the applications and infrastructure in the release. It provides data and tracking information on infrastructure provisioning, network changes, data center migrations, quality process checklists and Change Control Board approvals.
