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UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer Create and provision new environments in the cloud

The Blueprint Designer is a separately-installed component that is included with the UrbanCode Deploy product suite.

While UrbanCode Deploy drives deployment automation of applications into existing environments, Blueprint Designer creates and provisions new environments in the cloud.

Blueprint Designer Licensing
The UrbanCode Blueprint Designer does not require separate or extra licenses. It can be used with all UrbanCode Deploy license scenarios.

Blueprint Designer provides a design tool to create full-stack environments using standard orchestration technologies, including OpenStack Heat and Terraform.

This post shows the OpenStack Heat orchestration. Terraform will be discussed later. Continue reading “UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer Create and provision new environments in the cloud“

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Create a UrbanCode Deploy Cluster using AWS

Let’s see how to install and configure a 2 node uDeploy cluster with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

First of all create 2 Linux Instances (if you are asking why not Microsoft Windows Server you can stop reading and go for a walk).

Choose your region and click on EC2, then “Launch Instance”:

Click next until “Configure Security Group”, then choose a name for your group like “uDeploy” and add rules to open inbound ports: 22, 8443, 7918, 7919 and 2049 like fig. below:

Continue reading “Create a UrbanCode Deploy Cluster using AWS”

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Safe Edit in UrbanCode Deploy by Steve Boone

In this video Steve Boone, Product Owner and Development Manager for IBM Urban Code Deploy, show us a new useful feature of uDeploy:

To enable this feature go to Settings -> System Settings -> Component Settings and turn on:

Enable Safe Edit of Component Processes

and

Require Approval to Promote Component Process

Have a nice day!

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Property Priority Order of precedence

If a uDeploy property is defined in multiple places, its value is determined by the property priority or order of precedence. The following list defines the order of precedence from highest to lowest:

– Process
– Component version
– Resource
– Agent
– Environment
– Component
– Application
– System

If you have an environment property named ${p:environment/app.url} and a resource property with the same name, you can refer to the resource property by using ${p:app.url} or ${p:resource/app.url}.

Because the resource property is higher on the order of precedence than the environment property, in this case you must refer to the environment property by using the scoped format: ${p:environment/app.url}.

Anyway if you have a Replace Tokens Step, priority depends on the order of the Property List . Let’s suppose to have an environment property and an agent property with same name: hostname.fqdn

If Property List is like:

${p:environment/allProperties},${p:agent/allProperties}

agent property will win.

If Property List is like:

${p:agent/allProperties},${p:environment/allProperties}

environment property will win.

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Stop WebSphere Application Server with uDeploy

When you want to stop a Cluster or a Server you need a component process well designed or your application process can fail.

Start with a Check Status step. It checks the status of the Server/Cluster and fails if the Server/Cluster is already stopped.

The second step, Stop Server, it doesn’t need explanations.

Then Wait for server or cluster to stop.
Here you can set the:
– Timeout (seconds) to wait for the server or cluster to stop before the step fails.
– Interval (seconds): The time to wait between status checks.

Finally, in case of Wait for Server/cluster to stop timeout we add a Terminate Server/Cluster step.

Have a nice day!

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Replace Tokens

One of the most useful thing you can do with UrbanCode Deploy  is the “replace tokens” job.  SysAdmins deal everyday  with differents environments such as DEV,  SIT, UAT, PROD. Your application needs different values like hostname, url, port, log level and much more depending on the environment where it’s deployed.

When you need to automate deployment process you must get rid of these values. With UrbanCode Deploy (uDeploy) you can create environment variables, assign values to these variables for each environment and create a component process  who will replace  tokens.

What we need is a uDeploy Server running installation, at least one uDeploy Agent and a plug-in called File Utils plug-in . Then we create a Component, an Application and one Environment. See images below:

Our goal is to automate the process of deploying a configuration to different environments. Let’s create an Environment Property Definition in our component:

Continue reading “Replace Tokens”