Tag Archives: AnthillPro

AnthillPro 3.8 Arrives

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Our team is excited about the release of 3.8 (the last major release under the “AnthillPro” brand). There are lots of great new features and a special emphasis on easier maintainance and management in environments with hundreds or thousands of projects or servers.

Personally, I am particularly excited about using jobs multiple times in a workflow and easier inter-project dependency configuration. For more on the new features, check out the 3.8.0 release page.

Also available (for 3.7+) are new or updated plugins for IBM’s Rational Team Concert & ClearCase, Amazon EC2, VMWare vCenter Lab Manager, Bullseye, Microsoft IIS, Websphere, Fitness, Selenium, and TestNG.

Customer Success Story: A DevOps Team by Any Other Name

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Provides Just as Much Value

I recently visited a customer and was surprised to learn just how sophisticated their IT operation is. They have a private cloud for Dev and Test and automated deployments (courtesy of AnthillPro) across all environments. The development and QA teams may request an environment for a specified period of time and then deploy their build to this environment for testing. This entire system, the environment provisioning and the application deployment is fully automated and turns what used to be a multi-week process into a one that literally takes minutes. BTW, these environments are non trivial as they are made up of multiple virtual machines along with network configuration, firewall rules, load balancing, edge caching, and more. Continue reading →

UrbanDeploy’s GA Release

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UrbanDeploy has just reached its first GA release. We’d like to thank the early adopters who have been using the tool with great success prior to this milestone as well as all the AnthillPro users who helped teach us just what a pure deployment tool should look like.

UrbanDeploy is designed to handle complex application release automation (that’s the overly precise term for “deployments”). Lots of teams have continuous integration, but no release automation, or use an automation tool in just test environments or production. UrbanDeploy is designed to consistently deploy across environments regardless of what (if anything) you use on the build side.

UrbanDeploy is the first element of our fourth generation automation platform (the DevOps Platform) to reach the market. We’re looking forward to get more elements out this year and early next as well as migrating existing AnthillPro customers to the updated platform.

10,000 Builds a Month and Nobody Noticed

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Last week I was updating our website. I made some changes locally and committed them. A few minutes later, I was back at my desk after refreshing my coffee and immediately was concerned. My instant message client was not blinking as it should be. Where was my “build complete” notification? Where was the notification of deployment to test?

Concerned, I logged into AnthillPro and checked current activity. My build had just started, and there was a bit of a queue. No big deal, I was notified a few minutes later of completion. When the same thing happened the next day, I started to get curious since usually our build farm has plenty of capacity and queuing is rare. I checked the metrics. 10,000 builds in the last month. An average week day saw 400+ builds. I knew we were doing more and more, but that’s a crazy number. In simple CI where each commit triggers one build and each developer is committing about twice a day, 10k builds would be appropriate for 200 developers. We have less than that. Continue reading →

New Property Formats in AnthillPro

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Starting in 3.7.4, new property formats were added. There are two big shifts:

  • Optional, shorter syntax
  • Optionally resolve properties to blank

As someone who uses properties in AnthillPro pretty religiously, I’m excited by both. However, it appears that many teams didn’t notice the new options, so I’ll provide an overview here.

Shorter Formats

Properties in AnthillPro have traditionally been referenced with the syntax ${property:foo} for standard properties and ${agent:foo} for agent specific properties. There’s also the legacy ${foo} syntax that works for agent properties. This is well and good, but we noticed it could be a lot of typing and could result in some hard to read command lines or options. So there is a shortened option of each: ${p:foo} and ${a:foo} are now legal for standard and agent properties respectively. Continue reading →

Email and Report Template Helpers

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Brian Kelly at the Build & Deploy blog noticed that AnthillPro’s example report templates use some utilties to do things like format dates: $fn.formatDate($step.StartDate) .

Brian was curious what the $fn utility was and did some digging. I think that what he found could be useful for a number of folks writing reports or custom email templates. Check out Brian’s work on his blog.