The growing DevOps crossover zone between developers and operations staff has been bolstered this week with ElectricDeploy from Electric Cloud. The company has aimed to differentiate its take on this comparatively new genre within the world of software application development by stressing the application delivery "automation" that its new solution brings to the ElectricCommander platform.

Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag distinguishes DevOps automation as a distinct progression over and above manual or script-based deployments. Maciag stresses the need to achieve faster deployments with smaller margins for error, but says that his company's study of 730 applications development and operations professionals indicated that 75 percent of today's application deployments are done manually or with little automation.

NOTE: The survey also found that more than 70 percent of application deployments occur in development, QA, and preproduction environments before being deployed into production environments.

The DevOps Dream: Consistency, Reliability, and Visibility

Gartner analyst Ronni J. Colville argues that deployment automation improves the consistency, reliability, and visibility of application deployments across all environments. "Equally important, an integrated solution that enables the Dev and Ops teams to iteratively refine and improve the deployment process is key to enabling DevOps and error-free production deployments."

When Electric Cloud talks about automated and standardized application deployments "across all environments", the company means development, Quality Assurance, preproduction, and production. The firm's model-driven approach works by modeling applications, related environments, and processes that deploy and recover applications.

Electric Cloud explains that ElectricDeploy "refines deployment processes" throughout the application delivery pipeline with three separate capabilities: Code-Safe for runtime debugging; Run-Safe to define success and failure thresholds for application deployments (so that deployments can account for real-world solutions); and Recover-Safe to enable teams to define recovery policies and processes for dynamic management of deployment failures.