DEVOPSdigest

Serena Software announced the new release of Serena Deployment Automation.

Serena Deployment Automation helps customers implement application release automation, DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices by providing simple yet powerful ways to replace slow, error-prone manual processes, reduce deployment times and automate complex application deployments.

In highly regulated large enterprises, IT organizations are increasingly under pressure to deliver customer value faster and with better quality without jeopardizing compliance, introducing risk, or diminishing performance. These organizations are increasing looking to application release automation as a way to kick start their DevOps transformation and integrate their tool-chain.

Docker container technology has seen a rapid rise in adoption within both Serena’s enterprise customer base and the broader enterprise market. The ability of containers to deploy rapidly in both on premise and in the cloud, with minimal footprint across multiple environments, and in a repeatable manner has driven the rapid rate of adoption. The added benefits of reduced dependency concerns, the ability to share containers and inbuilt versioning all align closely with the needs of progressive enterprise IT organizations. With Serena Deployment Automation, enterprises can securely automate and orchestrate Docker deployments across multiple applications, via a graphically displayed, user defined pipeline, providing simple yet powerful ways to replace slow, error-prone manual processes, reduce deployment times and automate complex application deployments. The ability to define a successful container based deployment strategy helps large enterprises move fast without breaking things.

“I am proud to announce that Serena Deployment Automation (version 6.1) is now available. We have specifically extended our plugin support for Docker so that large enterprise can benefit from our active pipeline management capabilities for container deployments, in conjunction with the automation of their more traditional application deployments,” said Julian Fish, Director of Products at Serena. “The use of container technologies like Docker in association with Serena Deployment Automation enables a much greater degree of pipeline automation and also full stack provisioning, enabling customers to deliver business value faster, with higher quality whilst also satisfying the security policies of large enterprises” he added.

Serena Deployment Automation Version 6.1 enables pipeline compliant DevOps implementations by both automating and simplifying application delivery across all of the environments in your application lifecycle.

Key new features of Serena Deployment Automation include:

- CAC / PKI authentication: Serena Deployment Automation now supports PKI certificates for user and agent authentication. For example, users who use smart card readers can be authenticated for login and deployment agents without valid certificates will not be able to communicate with the server. CAC / PKI certificate based authentication is a critical to heavily regulated enterprises.

- Enhanced Replication: Serena Deployment Automation now supports the export of a subset of data during system replication. This gives you more control over the information shared between types of servers. Replication enables the import/export of the entire deployment automation object hierarchy from one server to another, which is critical when logical security or physical network boundaries exist in your deployment lifecycle / pipeline.

- DevOps Tool-chain Integrations: Serena Deployment Automation provides out of the box plug-ins enable end-to-end application and infrastructure tool-chain automation. In addition to almost 100 existing plug-ins for application, infrastructure, cloud, virtualization, network, and database deployments, we’ve added and extended plug-ins for Serena Business Manager, Email Client, Bamboo, and Docker and upgraded a number of existing plugins to ensure integration for all products in your entire deployment stack.

- Automatic Update Technology: Serena Deployment Automation can now detect and suggest server and agent upgrades so that you know when your implementation is eligible for upgrade to the latest versions. This optional feature allows customers to ensure that their Automation technology is running in a fully supported configuration of both Serena Software and Operating System / Java / Database configurations.