Deployment and release automation specialist UrbanCode has announced uRelease: which is essentially a governance tool with the capability to manage the release of complex and/or interdependent applications, infrastructure changes, and simultaneous deployments of multiple applications.

UrbanCode's co-founder and CEO Maciej Zawadzki has described uRelease as a holistic means of tackling the application "mega-release," where complex interdependent application exist. In this scenario, code changes in one app could impact as many as ten other different applications.

The company says that during a release, application changes are typically managed with a different set of tools than those designed to look after infrastructure — and this presents a visibility and tracking problem.

NOTE: The firm's product pages state that uRelease uses a holistic view of releases that combines the coordination and management of application changes with infrastructure changes to provide a "single pane of glass" view, where you can see the progress of the entire release.

Zawadzki points out that release management can necessitate the provisioning of new hardware or require operations to look at modifying network configuration — and these tasks essentially mean that application releases can often require infrastructure changes to a firm's IT stack.

uRelease is a release-centric tool that coordinates the release of multiple applications and keeps track of both infrastructure and application changes. uDeploy, UrbanCode's deployment automation tool, is an application-centric tool that handles the automated deployment of multi-tiered single applications. uRelease is not an automation tool. Instead, it works with uDeploy to deploy multiple applications in a release.

According to the UrbanCode website, uRelease integrates with uDeploy to manage multiple applications and changes outside the scope of application deployment automation. "uRelease orchestrates the changes across the applications and infrastructure in the release. It provides data and tracking information on infrastructure provisioning, network changes, data center migrations, quality process checklists, and Change Control Board approvals."