The solution is a great tool for hands-on deployment that is straightforward. It is easy to get exposure in terms of real-time work. 

I recommend the solution and rate it an eight out of ten. 

Trial and error is the best way to determine if this solution meets specific needs. This is a good solution for enterprise-level deployment automation. However, it may not be the best solution if one is only looking for a simple solution for deployment automation. 

We are currently comparing this solution with other options in the market such as Azure pipelines or the GitHub actions.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. 

Properly evaluate the ratio of applications that are based on newer architecture models (cloud native vs hybrid vs traditional). Weigh in that element into the decision and consider a hybrid approach: big vendors' ARA tools vs. new cloud-based deployment technology like Kubernetes.

UrbanCode Deploy is used as a part of the enterprise solutions that I work on, while Process Orchestration is what I work on in context to IBM, BBM, and Camunda products.

I'm not from the support team or the team who's handling this application, so I would not know about the deployment and whether it's easy or complicated to set up.

As I belong in a big enterprise, the volume of users is huge, and I don't even know people beyond my department. Thousands of people are using UrbanCode Deploy in our organization. Predominantly all the development teams are using it as consumers for their CI/CD pipeline.

I'm giving a score of seven out of ten for UrbanCode Deploy.

It’s a must have. UrbanCode Deploy provides great advantages.

Understand your environment, your processes, and how your teams use your technologies. Make sure you spend some time decomposing those areas and making sure that the orchestrations and automations you create fit your customers' needs. Don't have the expectation that it's going to be easy and plug-and-play out-of-the-box.

In my opinion, the way you have to develop with UrbanCode Deploy is to use the graphical interface, which is nice. However, for development UrbanCode Deploy is slow. 

Each time you have to click on something, you have dropdown menus, etc. I am a coder by nature. Some tasks I would normally prefer to go faster. It would be better if I could type commands directly using UrbanCode Deploy.

I would give UrbanCode Deploy a six or a seven because it is not easy to set up. The documentation is not commonly found. I think it's pretty expensive too. UrbanCode Deploy is not so much used in the market. When you implement, it's not so easy but you can overcome that. Afterward, when it runs, it runs slowly to complete. Now that we have the solution, we rely on it and really trust it now. I would have given it more points if it were easier to work with. My final rating would be seven out of ten.

Take at least one month and properly evaluate the tool with a real business case because it was sold to us in a different way. We were told this tool can do anything and within a week you will have a solution. In reality, it took us three or four months even to come to the final solution. The tool is not as easy as the vendor says it is. You have to get used to it and you should not think that this tool is just magic that will solve your problem. You have to think around your current problem and then see how you can get that into the tool and not vice versa. Don't expect the tool to solve your problems.

Standardize processes as much as possible so that you can re-use them. Don't be afraid to create multiple applications when that reduces the complexity. Don't make applications really complex to try and do all these things all at once. If you can, break it down into smaller apps because they're easier to manage. Generally the more independent things are then the fewer things break at any one time.

If you have problems, it doesn't affect more than just the particular instance that you're looking at. Our developers have done a lot to break down our projects into smaller and smaller pieces so that they help with that. We can deploy an application, but if it's only got three modules that are changed, then we only need to deploy three modules. Breaking it down into independent pieces and reusing them, I think, is really important.

Integrating it with an automated build system, I highly recommend that. We use Jenkins. We can easily connect our Jenkins artifacts and push them to uDeploy so that they can be deployed. We have some interaction between the two so that we have good auditing and knowing which build is the one that got deployed. In fact, using versions that relate to the build version, so that when you go into uDeploy and you look at a version then you can see that that version came from specific build and the build tool, that's really helpful.

It just changed my whole job and made it easier. I'm sure that some people might have different opinions on that, but coming from where we were and getting to where we are was just never could have been done without uDeploy and it's just incredibly powerful for us.

This is a solution that I recommend but I think that for anybody who is interested in implementing it, I would suggest that they start by reviewing the resources that IBM has online. It is not complicated, and they will be comfortable with how the variables are used and that kind of thing.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Learn the API and automate common tasks from your CI|CD pipeline

It's a pretty straightforward tool for straightforward deployments. If they have many complicated deployments, they're going to really want to look at the plugins and what's out of the box to make sure that it's going to be able to do what they need to do, and that they need to make sure that they have the resources and time to spend setting it up.

This product is excellent for deploying components and running processes related to deployments. It is not intended to be a build system, but is easy enough to incorporate into any CI Build system. The tool has two "sister" products which work well with UrbanCode Deploy. It is intended for this tool to be used for larger companies.

It's really good if you have a lot of applications that need to be deployed in different environments. You need to have a team to support it because there's a lot of different pieces and it's a really deep solution. There are many features, only some of which we've been using. It's not the kind of thing that only one person can work on. It's not for a small shop; it's for an enterprise.

• Start with small wins to build momentum towards the larger applications.
• Align with the compliance team from the beginning. We had compliance and internal audit in the room for the PoC to run through concerns up front.

The product became more complex after IBM acquired it.

Think about what deployment automation really is. It means no tweaking throughout the stages whilst applying changes. Everything must be code. That is the most important step; having everything as code.

Once that is done, then probably all of the good deployment tools in the upper-right corner can do the job.

In the end, deployment should be something that runs in the background; getting a signal to deploy something that has been created.

It's best to do a POC on the applications you're currently running to check the feasibility of using UrbanCode Deploy.

It is a good tool to use if you have a substantially big enterprise.

For DevOps, this tool is one of the best with all its integration capabilities for repositories and various systems. Perform the initial setup carefully, and probably with someone who has knowledge on the tool plus enough experience of designing infrastructure solutions. For me, the pain starts due to mostly incorrectly designed/implemented tools.

Look for other tools if IBM runs your datacentre.

Be sure to budget for/ accommodate a demo/dev/test environment for uDeploy as well as a production environment.

Before buying this, try the trial version and check if it serves your purpose.

If you are deploying independent components that are not involved in an enterprise scenario, then maybe this solution could work; however, if you have a complex scenario with multiple components and multiple complications, then it's better to choose a more powerful solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.