Today, Automic Software Inc. announced the public release of Automic V12—a massive update to its suite of DevOps and business automation tools designed to drive agility and responsiveness for enterprise operations.

This update changes the entire Automic unified portfolio including the company’s workload automation, release automation and service orchestration tools. The impetus behind this release is to ease the suffering enterprise groups face when attempting to engage in “digital transformation” or push business and IT infrastructure into the cloud. A 2015 survey of digital transformation efforts in the enterprise sector from Copperberg Research showed that 55.6 percent of companies queried (out of 620 respondents) believed that their company would gain a competitive edge in 18 months by pushing that paradigm.

“As organizations move toward digital transformation, enterprises are being asked to ‘rip and replace’ their core business applications into the cloud,” said Todd DeLaughter, chief executive of Automic Software.

As with any transformation, there are pain points for the lifecycle of applications and the development process. The engine and technology behind the Automic suite are designed to ease the work role of operations within the DevOps paradigm to provide Ops the tools needed to keep things running smoothly as Dev produces new functionality and new apps for release.

A screenshot of Automic V12’s enterprise DevOps dashboard. Image courtesy of Automic Software, Inc.

Delivering Ops the automation to power DevOps

Speaking to SiliconANGLE, Lucas Carson, vice president of strategy at Automic, said that most DevOps tools on the market have been produced by developers for developers. But too many of these tools have forgotten the role of operations. As a result, Automic is designed to ease the Ops in DevOps.

Most DevOps tools are designed around automation—the idea is to tidy up tedious or repetitive portions of a product lifecycle to speed time from build to deploy. To do this, DevOps tools program away these tedious activities by scripting and configuring them. Automating build phase is easy but automating deploy and maintenance is extremely complex and fraught with different environments, roles and rules.

“You can’t program away operations; it’s just too complex and they do too much,” Lucas explained. Once applications are live or being launched, Operations remains extremely important and sensitive to direct management.

He added, “There’s just not enough Ops in DevOps.”

Automic VP of Strategy Lucas Carlson. Image courtesy of Automic Software, Inc.

How Automic V12 helps Ops do DevOps

To woo the Ops side of DevOps, Automic V12 looks to simplify the job. The first change V12 does is to remove maintenance windows for operations teams by providing a zero-downtime solution when operations upgrades IT infrastructure or applications. With V12, Automic’s own customers suffer zero-downtime when upgrades are deployed for server agents. The software’s agents do this by reducing downtime impact by intelligently determining when to upgrade based on workload and operational schedule.

“One operational problem that cannot be solved by updating a few lines of code is ‘auto update of software,’” Lucas explained. “Enterprise software to date does not often auto-updated, instead still abides with a yearly update cycle.”

With its software and V12, Automic is trying to get around this by tightening release windows so that software stays up to date with minimal workflow interruption. As a result, customers can also take advantage of the same zero-downtime solution by implementing Automic’s own internal solution for continuous delivery.

The next upgrade Automic V12 brings to the table is called “Environment Blueprinting.” This is a provisioning method that allows operations to encapsulate application deployment plans and models into a rule-based deployment schedule. After setting up this model, enterprise IT can provide on-demand updates and application deployment with the click of a button (and the system will warn operations if a deploy-to environment does not have what is needed for the application to upgrade).

All of these updates are now part of Automic’s new unified interface that allows customers to gain insights from every system in their business from mainframe, open systems to the cloud all integrating solutions for workload automation and service automation. The unified interface also unifies analytics and reporting across the entire automation stack.

Automic Workload Automation V12, Automic Release Automation V12 and Automic Service Orchestration V12 are immediately available for general shipment.  All plugins are immediately available on the Automic Marketplace. Pricing is on demand for non-Automic customers.

Featured image credit: CC0 heladodementa, Pixabay