By standardizing the automated deployment application process, reducing the amount of errors due to manual steps and by providing visibility into the release cycles of various teams/applications, we've improved our global efficiency by at least 25% and still counting, since we've only used the product for a short period of time.

It has drastically improved how we function. We can now realize continuous delivery practices. We can automate more and integrate with other system much more easily.

Previously, for a planned release, an Excel-based implementation plan had to be created and validated beforehand in a production-like environment. On the go-live date, a high number of resources were required to run that implementation plan and perform a high number of deployments and validations. This eventually takes almost a day for a release leading to business impact and high release cost. The Excel implementation plan size climbs to 2000+ lines depending on the size of the release, which is prone to errors.

UrbanCode Release is used to run deployment from non-production environments and hence the plan continues to mature until we reach the go-live day. It is run through the non-production releases a number of times and hence is validated beforehand. With the usage of UrbanCode Release, we are able to save on efforts required to create a detailed, accurate implementation plan. Also, as it has direct connectivity with UrbanCode Deploy, we can schedule automatic deployments and hence save on time and cost of resources. The overall release efficiency has improved multifold.

One area is with Java deployment. We were able to reduce this from 20 steps to 4 or 5 steps, which is about a 4x reduction in complexity and specification, making it easier for our Java developers to develop and deploy their code.

The other area is not just with the tool itself, but with company culture and taking advantage of technology. UrbanCode Deploy has really transformed the way we do code deployment, connecting development and operations more closely. We're almost 100% of the way there with a cohesive devops, which I can quantify at about a 28% improvement.

In the beginning, this tool was completely new to us, to everybody in the company, actually. At that time, Urban CodeDeploy was not performing well at all. After that, when we started to use the tool more and had some better insights, UrbanCode Deploy started performing better. 

Last week we sat together with some IBM experts to see where we could gain some more deployment type of performance optimization. We still have to do this. We got new recommendations yesterday. We will now see how much effort it will take to implement them. We will not implement them if it takes over 2 weeks. 

If we can gain maybe ten or fifteen percent optimization with UrbanCode Deploy, then we will invest further in the platform. The tool is performing not so bad now.

It's provided us with more reliable and faster deployments, as well as the ability and flexibility to create and modify deployment applications to meet the needs of the ping.

• Centralization of our deployment process
• Unification of our nonprod and production deployment process

Our organization has already improved by quite a bit by taking out so much manual intervention from multiple people doing the deployments. We've simplified our process and the deployments are now much faster.

Teams are now able to schedule deployments to any environment and watch in a screen the deployment occur. This has allowed teams to reduce the number of staff online when a deployment occurs.

Tracking and audit-ability of the deployments are easy and allow teams to research any issues quickly and resolve the issue with little assistance.

It has provided a platform for traceability across the whole release cycle for more than 700 diverse applications.

It has automated the deployment of tasks to different environments which we were previously only able to do manually.

It’s not necessarily the product, but more the drive to automate deployment that results in improvements.

UCD gives the freedom to create reusable component templates. You set up a process for deploying something once, such as a standalone Java application, and then that is “templetized” and can be reused.

In these templates, you can:

• Standardize the used repositories, such as Nexus
• Standardize how an install.sh script must be made
• Determine how staging parameters must be stored in a config file.

Many of the improvements are, therefore, based around automating the deployments. They are automated in such a way that no more "screwdrivers under the hood" are allowed in any stage.

This saves time, and makes the process much more reliable, reversible, repeatable, and traceable. In the beginning, this is painful. I can’t stress enough how much effort should go into getting this right.

It's improved our organization's functions in a few ways.

1. It has automated the manual deployment process for all Java, .NET, and C++ applications;
2. It makes is easy to track production releases with date and time; and
3. It's gotten rid of the manual errors for deployment that occurred from manual testing.

Deployment to various environments can be done from a web interface without needing to manually copy files around or log into systems to run scripts.

Using reusable templates (mainframe and middleware), you can force developers to use the same rules for deployment. Also, you have choice to break that rule.

It has helped developers manage and deploy their own applications.

It provided a reduction in deployment time and lowered the application downtime.

Automated deployment forces the organization to standardize runtimes, development output and handling of platform provisioning.

Urbancode Deploy allowed us to implement a nearly-complete Continuous Delivery solution for one of our web applications - builds were deployed and promoted straight through from a development environment all the way to a Staging/UAT environment with little to no engineer interaction.

It reduced more than 70% of our manual effort when it automated deployment of both UNIX and Windows-based applications using UrbanCode Deploy. We used plugins available in the plugin center and used UNIX shell and powershell scripts to automate completely.

We are able to help customers automate deployments reliably.