Automated Deployment

Hi,

Currently our environemnt is setup as follows,

Everytime the user Submits/Publish contents from any branch in TeamSite, the data is deployed to Staging and production servers respectively.

How do we achieve this: iwat triggers are setup for submit/publish events. For any Submit/publish event, iwat executes a custom script which inturn invokes deployment scripts.

Disadvantages: Performance issue, Resource intensive, Incapable of parallel proccesing of request (events). When there are multiple submit/publish events, the coresponding deployments are in Queue.

Proposed Solution:
Replace Teamsite triggers with either of the following
a) Workflow : Create a custom menu to initiate a workflow which will submit/publish data.
b) Install and configure DataDeploy DAS component to manage event triggers : This is a Daemon process which can handle and service mutilple request parallel. The daemon will identify the submit/publish event and triggers a new process to execute the deployment script.

Can you please comment on the above proposed solutions or suggest a better way of handling this issue.

Current Setup:

TeamSite 5.0.1 for Solaris
OpenDeploy 4.5

We are moving to a new setup with TeamSite 5.5 for Solaris and OpenDeploy 5.6 (The proposed solution will be implemented in the new setup)

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Comments

Adam Stoller

If you use a workflow approach - you don't need a custom menu item to initiate it - there's a Submit button that will do that for you. This would probably be the way I'd go.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

farabi

I would like to have a Submit workflow which would deploy data to the Staging servers (This could be achieved using the Submit button) and a Publish workflow which would deploy data to the Production servers. Can I invoke a workflow on clicking the "Publish" option in the "File" dropdown?

Do you have any comments on the other option (Datadeploy)?
Thanks

iwovGraduate

I am not aware of any workflow trigger tied to the Publish in the File menu. You can have a externaltask (or cgitask if you need the user to enter some comments/edition name) in your workflow which can publish an edition.
Why not just invoke a workflow via submit or new_job (as suggested in previous post) instead of a menu item ?

DD 5.6 has significant performance improvements over older versions. However I would be cautious and not jump into it without analyzing the impact based on the current/projected usage.

Adam Stoller

For publish you either need an iwat trigger *or* remove the OOTB Publish menu item and put your own custom Publish menu item that prompts for the information to perform the iwpublish activity and then follows it with a deployment.

I'm assuming that the time at which something is submitted and deployed to your staging servers, and the time at which the staging area is approved to be deployed to your production environment are potentially separated by hours, if not days - and thus you don't want to tie the publishing and production deployment to the workflow process that is used to submit and deploy to staging - yes?

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Setting.png

farabi

Thats true. It might take days before the content in the staging servers are approved to be deployed to the production servers. I would go with the option of removing the publish menu item and put a custom menu item (We want to get away with the triggers).

As we have multiple users sharing a branch(and WORKAREA), they submit/publish data simultaneously. OD with the initiatorProperties element's pendSessions attribute is capable of handling only the "original deployment" and "the *last* invokation that was attempted to be initiated while the first had been running". Is there any way that- all the deployments that were inoked when original deployment is running complete succesfully?

Adam Stoller

Only use the pending sessions queue if you are doing source/target directory comparisons. Be careful if you are using it with sourceTeamsite deployments. Do NOT use it if you are using filelist deployments.

If you want to use filelist deployments and be able to run the same deployment concurrently with different filelists - read the documentation and look at the information on the '-inst' flag for iwodstart [or iwodcmd start].

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com