We are very pleased to announce the new IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery (SCCD) project on Jazz.net.

With the SCCD initiative, we plan to develop capabilities that help organizations reduce cycle times and deliver changes that are operationally-ready. What does this mean? In a nutshell we are providing functionality that enables development teams to deliver features to end users faster.  Also, SCCD provides operations teams the ability to ensure that changes have been tested against environments that they have defined. To accomplish this task we will focus on capabilities that promote strong working relationships between Development and Operations (DevOps).

What is SCCD?

All development teams know how hard it is to provision a test environment where their changes can be validated. Operations teams know how difficult it is to react to changes from development teams to ensure the test environments continue to function. The best way to resolve this problem is to have Development and Operations teams use the same tools and methodologies to automate the process of delivering changes on a continuous basis. This is necessary to receive immediate feedback on the quality of a change using environments that have the same assumptions as the production environment.

Our own team has been using Agile development tools and practices for years. Even when we started the SCCD project internally, we employed a continuous integration process to ensure that we could detect development problems early. Little did we realize that we were only catching a small number of the problems that a team faces when delivering changes to our end customers. As anyone knows that has had to configure an application, one small configuration problem can be disastrous. We came to the realization that we must plan, track, and manage all of our configuration changes just as we do our application code because it is just as important (maybe even more so). Automating deployments and tests are table stakes for faster delivery but the key for us was to employ a Continuous Delivery process. SCCD gave us the ability to automate how our changes were built, deployed, and tested so we could receive valuable feedback about the real quality of our changes. Our builds have the basic compile and unit testing but now, with SCCD, we deploy every change to a virtual environment in our cloud and run automated functional tests that are reported and tracked on each and every build result for quick retrieval. No longer is it a problem to setup a test environment and test changes. We do it hundreds of times a week!

IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery is an agile, scalable and flexible solution for end-to-end lifecycle management and automation, creating an environment that takes collaboration between Development and Operation teams to the next level. This is the real deal.

Key Benefits of SCCD

• Reduce cycle times with automated continuous delivery processes to continuously build, deploy, and test application and configuration changes
• Ensure the right bits and configurations are deployed to the right environments by applying version management throughout the delivery process
• Increase quality by automating deployment and testing of every change using production-like environments in the cloud
• Never lose track of a change again by using the same tracking and planning tools across Development and Operations

Key Features of SCCD

• Automate delivery using tools to create and configure a continuous delivery process to build, deploy, and test application and infrastructure changes in the cloud
• Plan and track application and infrastructure changes using an integrated set of tools across development and operations
• Manage release assets with a version controlled library management system to ensure the right bits get deployed to the right place
• Gain greater visibility into the operational quality of a change with continuous feedback accessible directly from RTC build results
• See into the cloud directly from within your Eclipse IDE to search, inspect, and manage your cloud resources
• Set clear expectations from Operations by using production-like cloud environments early in the development process for testing

How can you participate?

Through our IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery project page, you can access our release plans, dashboards, where you’ll be able to track our progress as well as to submit bugs and suggest enhancements. You also have direct access to our development team and the rest of the community members through our Q&A forum, where you can ask questions and get answers from the experts.

And, of course, we would love for you to try out SCCD yourself. We are currently offering a managed beta experience and invite you to participate by using our hosted environment to fast track your user experience.

On behalf of the entire team, we welcome you to the project, we hope you’ll join the beta program, and we look forward to collaborating on adopting and strengthening DevOps in your shop.

Daniel Berg
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery

**Our lawyers would like us to remind you that these are not finalized plans or commitments, but just work in progress, and plans are subject to change without notice. See the Terms of Use