Customers who have large development projects are looking at software development, deployment, and management in novel ways compared to legacy projects. More customers are investing in Agile, automated testing, and ways to write code faster. On the operations side things are floating up into the cloud or distributing into virtualization.

The problem: Investing in Agile and cloud hasn’t sped up the release process.

The solution: CA Technologies LISA, takes software (content, library, configuration) everything that needs to get deployed into an environment so that software can get running sooner. Based on a couple of acquisitions, LISA comes from ITKO–focused in service virtualization and test automation—and stands for “Load, Integrated, Service, Architecture” as it was known over 10 years ago. Now it’s just called LISA.

I spoke with David Cramer, Vice President of Product Management at CA Technologies, about what CA’s Release Automation suite can do for customers. It’s a complex product for the equally complex task of DevOps across virtual and cloud environments with an eye for automation, scalability, and all the needs that an Agile shop might worry about. The idea is to simply that task as much as possible while letting the team get down the nuts-and-bolts when they need to.

A good example of what LISA does is a “preflight checklist,” says Cramer, many applications have a similar set of checklists–what services are needed, where to put config files, what security scans are needed; release automation automates the process of this checklist across this release from getting the elements from the repository to installing in the correct sequence.

That sequence is usually Dev to Test to Pre-Production (or aka Staging) and finally Production. Each of these environments may differ from one another in space, time, machines, or even virtual setup (as well as hardware.) At each stage it’s necessary to make certain the product is prepared to run on the proper environment, collect data on how it runs, and feed that back to the necessary teams.

Release Automation orchestrates the movement of the builds across these stages of releases with autoconfiguration and automagical management. Including the ability to install proper elements, upgrading, and even pinging a manager or operations technician to get a job done.

Orchestrating the entire release process, or automating the entire lifecycle means less time worrying about what goes where or how it’s going to get there by the DevOps team.

CA Release Automation 4.7 brings LISA into focus for enterprise DevOps

In April 2013, CA Technologies acquired Nolio, a recognized leader in release automation for continuous application delivery, and further enhanced its service virtualization business. The most recent versioned out release is CA Release Automation 4.7 and it adds a great deal of comfort and interesting capabilities to the stack:

• The ability to minimize errors and improve software quality by simplifying and standardizing release processes;
• Enterprise-class, multi-release solution built for application release operations, enabling continuous releases across the application lifecycle;
• Centralized Release Operations from development to production;
• Automated application rollbacks for faster recovery and service continuity;
• Highly scalable, capable of automating large enterprise application release processes across a complex infrastructure, including thousands of servers, by replicating unique rules quickly;
• Ensuring cloud readiness with built-in virtualization and cloud support; and
• Designed to handle application software written in any programming language.

According to Cramer, scale-out, virtualization, and cloud are important components for the modern DevOps team added to 4.7 that will open up vast opportunities for teams to stay ahead of the market. These include integration with VMware, Amazon cloud, other 3^rd party clouds, or even CA Technologies cloud to virtualize into. As a product LISA RA enables a great deal of different connectors that will make almost any team happy with the capabilities and has room to grow.

The important part here is that the product is prepared to act elastically and scale with demand—especially because testing often needs to be as similar to production environment as possible (but it’s never possible to make test the same because that would require a duplicate of all the production hardware or cloud.)

Finally, the rollblack capability puts icing on this already useful product. The DevOps team might be amazing rockstars, but not everyone can prepare for externalities or bugs that interact badly with the production environment. The ability to quickly rollback all or a granular part of a deployment is a must.

To support this, CA Technologies added a milestones that could allow a roll-back to happen in the middle of a release cycle—something that Cramer points out that few competitors have in their products because it’s very complex and difficult. As a result, Release Automation 4.7 tracks “roll-back workflow” allowing DevOps to turn the crank backwards on the process and have it restore incrementally to “known good” while attempting to determine what went wrong.

CA LISA Release Automation “whole lifecycle orchestration”

In all, the totality of this product makes it look like an excellent foray into the DevOps world for holistic lifecycle orchestration. From my briefing with Cramer, I heard what sounds a lot like an attempt to meet DevOps at every part of the workflow from managing development, preparing environments, pushing the project through milestones and authentication, and even involving the human element with calling for eyeballs on the job (when the project needs a double-check.)

The result is software that takes into account the entire workflow and lifecycle of not just the software as it is built, matures, and gets deployed, but the concept that an IT Team is interacting with code, with machines, with testing, and even with customers.

This puts CA LISA Release Automation in a very strong position and will make it a valuable tool for DevOps teams everywhere.