UrbanCode Deploy Room for Improvement

CT
DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing. For example, driving to your home from the office is easy when there are one or two routes. With twenty routes, there is some initial confusion. 

View full review »
DP
Software Engineering Director at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take a long to resolve. The cost of the solution is high. 

It would be good to have the support of public cloud services like Azure. 

My team has also had some concerns around security when using this solution. 

View full review »
it_user587571 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
  • A simplified UI
  • A simplied licensing model
  • Lack of technical expertise available in the market that forces us to rely solely on IBM Professional Services
View full review »
Buyer's Guide
UrbanCode Deploy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about UrbanCode Deploy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PG
Engineering Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

A lot of times, the constant changes that happen in the application, the skillsets required, etc., become bottlenecks, and we have to constantly depend on teams. Any new variations that happen in the application, getting the whole pipeline to be built again, or changes to be done in the uDeploy code: All these become complicated and they take time. UrbanCode Deploy could be improved so all these processes are more comfortable, seamless, and rapid.

We were also trying to do an orchestration, and do a POC around how it could be leveraged for flexibility of BCT, switchovers, etc., a similar functionality as HBO, and I would love to see this single suite support that in the next release. I'm  really keen on exploring that.

View full review »
it_user631593 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Need more granular security: for example, access to the Settings tab is all or nothing. I would like to be able to grant access to parts of the Settings tab and also provide read-only access to parts as well.

Reporting: I am excited to learn more about Insights. Until then, native reporting in UCD needs a lot of work.

View full review »
it_user585882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Release Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Performance of the tool is quite slow. It takes a lot of time to load a plan if the plan size is bigger. Also, the reporting feature needs to be strengthened to provide more valuable real-time reports.

View full review »
it_user382419 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Its reliability has been a little suspect, and one of our frustrations has been that it's taken them some time to focus on fixing that problem. They're able to simulate customer environments and configurations in terms of size and setup, so that when they're in development, they can run test cycles and build product enhancements and fix problems for customers. Instead, it seems they're building something locally with synthetic data that doesn't really match any customer.

Another area of improvement would be plug-ins, which seem to not have kept pace with current technology. I feel that they don't have enough staff to build plug-ins, and it's a struggle for us. It should be part and parcel of what the product is, which includes the ability to integrate with many different technologies in a centralized deployment architecture. Plug-ins multiply the value of the product, especially when you then have the ability to stretch to new integrations and technologies without having to wait on IBM to develop something.

View full review »
YV
Rollout Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

What UrbanCode Deploy improved for us is that we have better visibility. We are not deploying faster with it. Actually, it's a little bit slower.

We have the software application automation fully under control with UrbanCode Deploy. Whereas when we did it the old way, we had failures.

Before we used UrbanCode Deploy it was difficult to find out why we had failures. Now, we don't have any failures anymore, or almost none. 

For the last couple of months, we have no failures at all and we have full visibility. The interface is doing very well. 

Performance-wise, our deployment now takes longer. We know that, but that's something that we can live with to take advantage of UrbanCode Deploy's other feature set.

We are one major version behind and we will do the updates internally. The only problem is UrbanCode Deploy is used not only by me but by all of the company. We all do our deployments with UrbanCode. Upgrading is not my decision. 

I certainly would like to have a better way to pass information between deployment steps using UrbanCode Deploy because that's really difficult to do. 

Personally, I would like it if you can loop on some things like the tags and the agents. I would like to have some more loops.

View full review »
it_user387957 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Release Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

We're running version 4.8.4, which isn't the latest version. This version lacks reporting, which may be improved in the latest version.

View full review »
AD
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

This solution could be made more flexible with respect to deploying databases. Liquibase is a valuable feature but it is weak and could be better. I have just seen a video on a product called Datical, and the database workflows are easy to manage.

Not just anybody can use this tool without first taking at least the basic training online.

I would like to have the agent up and running at all times, as opposed to only while it is in the DevOps pipeline.

View full review »
it_user566595 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Specialist, Development, D2C DevOps Architecture at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

It makes it easier to create new resources, especially new components, and to import new servers into uDeploy Environments.

View full review »
it_user375798 - PeerSpot reviewer
Coordinator-Release Management at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Sometimes the deployment process reports are faulty. I've run into situations where the job says it was successful but it really erred-out. It would be nice if the reports are correct all the time.

The configurations tab takes forever to load. It doesn't work very well so that needs to be improved. Also, you can't filter by resource tag, which would be useful.

View full review »
it_user380979 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The reporting functionality is limited and it is difficult to retrieve information from the database due to the table structure.

View full review »
it_user387936 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The biggest area of improvement that I would suggest is in the upgrade process. We started 2015 with uDeploy 4.7, and in order to get the latest version, we had to upgrade first to version 5, which was introduced for the IBM branding. That was straightforward enough, but the jump from version 5 to version 6.1.2 was enormous. We had to focus on testing the security model because it was completely new. We documented and tested it in a production environment. Once we did the upgrade, we found another big change in the version implemented, which we didn't anticipate and which caused problems in our production environment. We re-architected the implementation and there were 4-5 failings we had to work through. Future upgrades probably won't be this difficult, but this one was tough.

In terms of functionality, the reporting could be improved a bit. It seems like the new version has better reporting capability, but data visualization would be nice to have.

View full review »
it_user167901 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Technical Analyst at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Licensing structure - pay per machine deployed to.
  • Additional integrations with ALM solutions.
  • Unclear why it doesn't support build automation, which is covered by a separate product.
View full review »
it_user412374 - PeerSpot reviewer
AIX Build&Deployment Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

They need to reduce the footprint and improve the performance of UD agent. If the agent runs for too long it can cause a memory issue on the production server. We must keep the agent offline and only enable them during deployment.

View full review »
it_user459012 - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-founder at ClarityWorks BV

WebSphere deployments, for some reason, don’t work out-of-the-box. We have worked on the Websphere issue with the IBM uDeploy development team a lot more now. What we want to be able to do is apply configurations to the Websphere using the standard plugin. This can be done by creating json snippets that must be parsed with the large json files of the cell, the node and the server that have been created during the mandatory initial configuration discovery of the target machine. We have had lots of difficulties getting the parsing to work, now a new version of the config plugin has been released which is an improvement. 

However, what we want to be able to do with our CICD automation is to create configurations paired with the EAR files so that we can start doing partial updates, of only the parts that have changed. Also rollbacks will this way be much easier to accomplish. uDeploy can not work like this to date, the plugins do not allow it.

UCD needs to perform a discovery of the environment. This would not be needed if it would understand more about WebSphere environments and releases.


View full review »
it_user382521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Development and Deployment Support at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think that the IBM support team needs to be more proactive in their responses to PMR tickets raised by customers. Also, the plugins for ServiceNow Integration need to be updated.

View full review »
it_user163443 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Full blown support for repositories such a SonaType Nexus would be better than having to deploy an agent to watch particular filesystem paths.

View full review »
it_user564675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist - DEVOPS at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The Archiving policy is something which should be looked at.

The resource tree is pretty bulky and slow. Making a change to the resource tree manually is pretty difficult when size increases.

View full review »
it_user401046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

More out of the box plugins are required though good number are avaialble at the moment.

View full review »
it_user181425 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

They could add support for some of IBM’s own middleware. IBM is so big a company that the left hand doesn’t understand the right hand.

View full review »
it_user163686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Upgrade & Migration from older versions, as well as Import & Export of application automation data between multiple environments has some room for improvement.

View full review »
SS
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

More plugins are required. There are also many bugs in UrbanCode Deploy. Finally, database deployment and rollback of databases needs to be worked on.

View full review »
NR
Professional Services Leader at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I would like to see more reporting for container architecture.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
UrbanCode Deploy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about UrbanCode Deploy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.