What is the worst nightmare for IT services when
deploying new versions of software? A system crash. That's why operators of
datacentres of all sizes are constantly creating backups that take up valuable
storage space on the rack. Even worse, if datacentre technicians forget to do
backups immediately before a new deployment, a crash could result in the need
to use a backup that is far too old.
All of that may now be history thanks to UC4's release
of Application Release Automation Version 3 (ARA 3.0). The new version of their
software includes built-in rollback capabilities that eliminate the need for
constant software backups. With automatic rollback ARA 3.0 reverts to the last
working version of a software package should a crash occurred during
deployment.
“Automatic rollback has been the holy grail of deployment
automation for a long time,” said UC4 VP of ARA Technologies Wesley Pullen.
"Our built-in rollback capability eliminates the need for customers to back-up
their existing applications as part of a deployment.”
What's more, the software eliminates the need for
techs to back-up and restore artefacts in the event of a rollback. ARA 3.0
makes the whole deployment process very stable by monitoring and looking for
problems proactively. In many cases it can respond to those problems before
they cause an unrecoverable failure. It works so well users are often not aware
that anything has happened in the background.
Two of the best features of UC4 ARA 3.0 include:
- Configuration Snapshots - The software takes configuration snapshots that keep track of all the changes occurring from one deployment to the next. Even when a rollback is necessary configuration settings are not lost.
- Multiple Tenancy - Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, as well as other large-scale operations, can host multiple clients on a single, scalable server with full automation.
Software Management Just
Got Tons Easier
Data centre providers offering collocation and web
hosting have been looking for this sort of software for quite a long time. It's
too early to say if it's a definitive game changer, but things are pointing in
that direction. Having rollback capability completely changes the software
management paradigm because, if it delivers as advertised, it should
drastically reduce the potential for downtime whether software deployments are
happening in the cloud or under traditional web hosting.
We know how important that is given some recent
outages suffered by major retail organizations. Not too long ago a simple
software upgrade knocked out large portions of one organization's website that
were hosted on cloud servers on America's East Coast. If automatic roll-back
had been deployed there would not have been so much as a glitch.
ARA 3.0 might be just what some datacentre operators
need to convince clients to switch to the cloud. According to surveys done late
last year fears of security issues and software crashes were the top two things
preventing widespread cloud migration. With UC4 ARA 3.0, at least one of those
concerns seems to have been adequately addressed.
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