Integrate Button: Continuous Integration, Deployment, Testing, Feedback

Continuous Integration as a Service Beta Now Available

Deploy working software at the click of a button

We are pleased to announce the release of our CI as a Service product from Stelligent. Using Continuous Integration as a Service, you get running with CI along with a complete development environment stack in minutes and manage it. Moreover, you have full unfettered access to the instance. You can start and stop fully configured virtual instances at any time.

The tool installs and configures the Hudson CI server, MySQL database, Subversion, Ant, Maven, Java and all other necessary tools to create and manage working software at the click of a button. It also runs a one-click build and deployment of working software from source code. At Stelligent, we use the CI as a Service to create working software from our SVN version-control repository - on demand.

See the video that demonstrates how to start using CI as a Service. The basic steps are:

1. Click the "Try it Out" button from the Stelligent website.
2. Enter your email address and password and click the Give me CI button.
3. Review the price information and click the Purchase button
4. You will receive an confirmation page. From this page, you can click the Download Key button to download your private key to access your virtual instance or monitor your CI instances.
5. In about 15 minutes, you will receive an email with links to your provisioned virtual instance and running Hudson Continuous Integration server

At this point, you have a fully-configured CI environment. Moreover, you have full access to this instance to configure as you please. No need to negotiate with your Systems/Operations team or wait for them to provision an environment. Build and deploy your software in a clean environment at a moment's notice. Sign up for the beta of CI as a Service and let us know your experiences with it.

CI as a Service is a product and accompanying service offering from Stelligent. Our CEO literally wrote the book on Continuous Integration. We are passionate about helping our customers automate the entire software delivery process to get software to users more quickly.

There's a big difference between automated and automatic

In our work, we interact with people from many different teams: developers, QA/testers, operations, etc.. In some organizations, operations may be further segmented into SCM, DBAs, Security, and so on. And, in other cases, some functions might be combined. But, if I had a nickel for every time I asked someone whether some process was automated and they incorrectly told me yes, well...you know the rest. This is why definitions matter sometimes. It's the difference between automated and automatic.

What they mean is:

• We wrote some scripts for that
• You have to log into each of the machines separately to run the processes
• Your environment/machine has to be configured just right to run the scripts
• You must manually execute each of the scripts separately
• A human must be present to run the scripts
• It's "automated"
  

What I mean is:

• The scripts are run headless (i.e. from a single command)
• The scripts are checked into the version-control repository
• The scripts have been integrated into the build and/or deployment scripts -- and all processes can be run from a single command
• That the automation is automatic

The difference between the approach they think is automated and what I think is automated is vast. But, it's not about using the right definitions; it's about having a common understanding of the goals you want to attain. The "manually automated" approach leads to significant bottlenecks (real scenario: 100 projects and 10 target environments per project means that your development is stopped every single time someone must manually perform these repetitive activities).

So, the next time someone tells you "(their) stuff is automated", you might want to ask a few questions because each manual task slows down the entire process which costs time, money and frustration.