ZeroTurnaround has released version 2.0 of its hot update tool LiveRebel. The new iteration is designed for operations teams to instantly roll out and roll back live deployed applications into and out of production with zero downtime.
The Estonian company's marketing department coined the term "hot update" to describe what is fundamentally a continuous delivery and continuous deployment tool. Company CEO Jevgeni Kabanov says his firm's product is an out-of-the-box solution designed to end inefficient production deployment processes that (as he puts it) often happen at 3 AM by overworked operations staff.
LiveRebel's new features include the ability to select various update strategies to meet the needs of a particular update plan. Updates can be done:
- via hot patching
- via controlled rolling restarts
- by targeting selected servers for updating
LiveRebel's ability to hot patch live Java applications without downtime or losing user sessions is powered by Rebellion Technology, ZeroTurnaround's own proprietary method of instant class reloading. The company solicits its own extensive (if somewhat partisan) developer surveys and has pointed to poor deployment issues "rife" among development teams as a result of problems associated with:
- acceptance testing
- application updates
- database updates
- server management
"ZeroTurnaround is prepared for the challenge of changing the way operations teams think about their deployment processes, making continuous delivery and continuous deployment a highly viable option for companies," said Kabanov. "It's time we let the Java community at large know that we have the tools needed to improve the way organizations develop, test, and deploy applications."
