UrbanCode Deploy Reviews

There are three main valuable features for us:

1. The ability to deploy objects consistently to any of our multiple environments;
2. Prior deployments and logging stored in a web GUI which can be accessed by any member of the team; and
3. Flexibility of the plugin system to use features supplied by IBM or the ability to write our own.

Teams are now able to schedule deployments to any environment and watch in a screen the deployment occur. This has allowed teams to reduce the number of staff online when a deployment occurs.

Tracking and audit-ability of the deployments are easy and allow teams to research any issues quickly and resolve the issue with little assistance.

The reporting functionality is limited and it is difficult to retrieve information from the database due to the table structure.

We've used it for about one year.

We encountered no issues with deployment.

We have occasional minor issues with stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

6/10

7/10

The prior solution was created by our company. We determined that to add the features required to expand our solution, it was better to use a vendor product.

The initial setup was straightforward and well-documented.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

I'm not able to answer this.

Cost is based on the number of agents installed. This is normally one agent per target box/system.

Yes, we evaluated Jenkins.

This product is excellent for deploying components and running processes related to deployments. It is not intended to be a build system, but is easy enough to incorporate into any CI Build system. The tool has two "sister" products which work well with UrbanCode Deploy. It is intended for this tool to be used for larger companies.

Plugin-based architecture.

It has provided a platform for traceability across the whole release cycle for more than 700 diverse applications.

• Licensing structure - pay per machine deployed to.
• Additional integrations with ALM solutions.
• Unclear why it doesn't support build automation, which is covered by a separate product.

3 months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No - scalability is handled via client relays which offload the server's work to proxies.

Good.

Good so far. Not a lot of history there.

Yes, we used Build Forge. It's a build tool that was being re-purposed for deploy and it was beginning to fail often.

Very straightforward. Command line prompts to install all components, and hook into enterpriseDB. Trial version will use its own Derby DB.

TBD. Have handled most of this in-house so far, but we have a service contract available. No info on expertise.

No specific numbers right now, but we're saving the deploy team, the infrastructure team, the help desk team, and the development teams many hours. Results are variable based on how much automation was already done, and the quality of the legacy code.

Evaluated Automic, CA product offerings. Also kept tabs on the Serena offering.

• Start with small wins to build momentum towards the larger applications.
• Align with the compliance team from the beginning. We had compliance and internal audit in the room for the PoC to run through concerns up front.

Reusable templates make your life easier.

Using reusable templates (mainframe and middleware), you can force developers to use the same rules for deployment. Also, you have choice to break that rule.

Since 2016.

In our implementation, we created 16 PMR for this product. 15 of them were solved.

Perfect. IBM has one of the best customer services.

Perfect. IBM has one of the best technical supports.

No.

We implemented in-house.

Gates is one interesting feature, which will help approvers provide their approvals in advance, without having to rely on when deployment happens.

It has helped developers manage and deploy their own applications.

The Archiving policy is something which should be looked at.

The resource tree is pretty bulky and slow. Making a change to the resource tree manually is pretty difficult when size increases.

I have been using it for more than six years.

Sometimes logs were not returned back and answers were not found, but still re-executing them worked fine.

Also, when the application history grows and resource tags with component tags are used, actual deployment take-off occurs much later than when you start the deployment.

I have not encountered any stability issues, as such, in 6.1

I have encountered scalability; the artifact's clean-up policy is not efficient, so it takes up a huge amount of storage.

Also, when you have a large number of components in the same application, the deployment take-off is very slow. I assume it fetches the current inventory and compares it against the requested version.

Customer service is good, as opposed to earlier products where recreating the problem on the IBM side used to take days.

Support is great, I would say. They are very reachable, collaboratively connect and help solve the problem

We had home-grown solutions different for different applications. We have standardized by adopting this solution.

Initial setup was not that complex, but you need to work on integrating this with your company standards, and tools and policies supported.

Implementation started initially with vendor support but post that, it was done on our own. This was when there were only a few members at the company when we started in 2010. So, not much documentation and help was available.

ROI is difficult to explain but it's provided huge savings.

It is a bit costly but good ARA tools are not free, and this has competitive pricing.

Before we chose this solution, we evaluated other options.

It is a good tool to use if you have a substantially big enterprise.

• Rich plugins
• Visualized process design
• Visualized approval process

It has automated the deployment of tasks to different environments which we were previously only able to do manually.

They need to reduce the footprint and improve the performance of UD agent. If the agent runs for too long it can cause a memory issue on the production server. We must keep the agent offline and only enable them during deployment.

We've used it for three years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There was no issues with the stability of UD agent.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

In my experience, I'd say that technical support has been good so far.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

We compared UrbanCode Deploy with XebiaLabs XL. We chose UCD because of the process design function.

The product became more complex after IBM acquired it.

It has flexible deployment options, allowing us to model our components as we want and need, which is the most valuable feature we've found from our experience with it.

It reduced more than 70% of our manual effort when it automated deployment of both UNIX and Windows-based applications using UrbanCode Deploy. We used plugins available in the plugin center and used UNIX shell and powershell scripts to automate completely.

More plugins are required. There are also many bugs in UrbanCode Deploy. Finally, database deployment and rollback of databases needs to be worked on.

I've used it for one year two months.

It does not support variable changes and utilizations while executing the application. We were setting the variable values in the application process and using it in the same process, but apparently that's not supported.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

Technical support is very good.

Refer to the IBM Learning Center as that will help with the setup

We used a vendor team for our implementation.

Rundeck is also a good option, but UrbanCode Deploy provides more features and is easier to use.

Before buying this, try the trial version and check if it serves your purpose.

• Automatic detection of new builds (via an agent on Nexus).
• The ability to easily create a custom deployment workflow in the web interface.

Deployment to various environments can be done from a web interface without needing to manually copy files around or log into systems to run scripts.

Full blown support for repositories such a SonaType Nexus would be better than having to deploy an agent to watch particular filesystem paths.

We've been using IBM UrbanCode for 3 months.

No issues with deployment and the automatic deployment of agents and agent relay has proved very useful.

We have not encountered any issues with stability.

Currently a single node is sufficient for our needs, so scalability has not been an issue.

There was no need to contact customer service.

There was no need to contact technical support.

The previous solution was a mix of manually copying files around and logging into systems to run scripts. IBM UrbanCode Deploy enabled us to easily take builds from SonaType Nexus and deploy them into the environments without needing manual steps.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to install and configure IBM UrbanCode Deploy and remotely deploy its agents.

In-house.

Before chosing this product we also evaluated Midvision RapidDeploy, Thoughtworks Go and Xebia Labs XL Deploy.
Thoughtworks Go: the plugin to integrate with Sonatype Nexus is a thirdparty plugin and has been broken for sometime.
Xebia Labs XL Deploy: The set up of each app for deployment is overly complicated.

Ability to do automated deployments. It does what it promises: It helps you automate deployments. But, it works better for some application component types than for others.

Automated deployment forces the organization to standardize runtimes, development output and handling of platform provisioning.

They could add support for some of IBM’s own middleware. IBM is so big a company that the left hand doesn’t understand the right hand.

I’ve been using UrbanCode Deploy for too long.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is bad.

We had various solutions before this one.

Setup was complex because IBM started on the wrong foot.

Don't use the tool in combination with IBM as datacentre manager.

We didn’t evaluate other tools. We were forced to use it by IBM as datacentre manager.

Look for other tools if IBM runs your datacentre.