How HCL Launch enables enterprise-level DevOps

Growing demand for rapid software development across industries can require complex DevOps setups. Advanced capabilities like shorter development lifecycles, reduced deployment failures, enhanced efficiency in communication, and cost reduction are driving the demand for DevOps solutions and services. With the important of speed-to-market increasing, enterprises are adopting DevOps solutions for quick development and deployment and to significantly reduce manual processes, cutting down on coding errors.

What does this look like in practice? Enter HCL Launch, which is built to handle the most complex deployments and enable speedy software upgrades for large enterprises.

Typical Continuous Delivery pipeline where HCL Launch is used as main IT application

Enterprise use case – Single IT webform to enable DevOps

Imagine a development team would like to get infrastructure as easy as through a click of a button. Development teams would look for IT to help through filling a simple form and get things done. This process looks simple from Development tools – build & package tools. But becomes complex from deployment – release phases.

The complex phase

A complex organization would have the following major groups managing IT differently, each with their own preferred set of tools. All must come under a single form to provide effective DevOps.

• IT infrastructure provisioning tools for on-prem, cloud
• Development and Continuous integration tools
• Deployment and release tools
• User Access management tools

HCL Launch is the right fit to integrate with a large set of IT tools, and provides easy options to map development teams’ requirements into it to achieve continuous deployments. One of the great features of HCL Launch is that it fulfills IT heads’ “Single Form” infrastructure asks through its template concepts. What you define in user web form is a template in action from HCL Launch.

Deployment and release phases need to complete the following efficiently and without error:

1. Visualize application as bundle of several artifacts developed by different scrum/micro service teams
2. Move application containing different versions of artifacts into Dev-QA-Stage-Prod type environments securely without modifications to artifacts smoothly.
3. Deploy, rollback and audit them several times on weekly [sprints] basis
4. Support for 100 of such applications at deployments into on premise and cloud infrastructure at this scale.
5. Ensuring right teams operate on right set of artifacts deployments
6. Provide options for automated and manual approval processes
7. Integrate with wide range to IT tools to get and deploy artifacts

Finally, remember you are responsible for ensuring that all enterprise applications get into the same maturity level as its quite complex to manage heterogenous processes and keep track. You are required to ensure that you have templates for each and every ask provided above. Beyond this, successful DevOps requires that you:

1. Provide option to deploy full application at highest level
2. Deploy partially based on modules or components that are impacted instead of full application release
3. Rollback as quickly and easily as possible

HCL Launch key concepts to simplify complex phase

HCL Launch provides very simplified definition for visualizing the software application as below:

• Application
• Component
• Environment
• Resources
• Processes
• Team
• Properties that control customizations

By applying these key concepts, you can define any small or large application to satisfy all criteria we have seen in above use case.

Why is HCL Launch the right choice here?

1. Templates – HCL Launch provides template for application, components, agents, processes, resources, teams and what all IT needs to get easily achieve a standard way of application deployments across organization.
2. API-First approach – HCL Launch believes in API-first approach and offers almost all functionalities through API, making it easy to integrate into enterprises of any scale
3. Sever and agent model – to define application resources easily and plug-play as needed. Helps to ensure health and up time for infrastructure for deployments
4. Integrations to IT tools through Plug-in – several plug-ins provided by HCL Launch enables to integrate with most popular DevOps tools to define deployment and orchestration processes. Also enables you to write your own plug-in as well for proprietary tools
5. Deployment Calendar – Keep simple deployment calendar to visualize overall deployments at IT
6. Audit for compliance – By default provides audit information to track every activity and deployments to refer any time for compliance
7. Growth management – When you offer some thing great for deployments you would expect growth of number of applications using HCL Launch. So HCL Launch offers things like HA topology, Agent relays, active-active servers, distributed front end etc.

Well-defined continuous deployments enable strong release management practices for enterprise, and well-defined continuous deployments are achieved through HCL Launch.