We help our customers in improving their business agility by leveraging DevOps frameworks in the best possible manner driven by a continuous improvement approach. On that mission, We use XLDeploy in order to drive deployment automation for our customers. One of the best things about it helps in simplifying and speeding up deployment. In most deployment automation solutions you build deployment scripts. Either you will write a lot of scripts, or you knit your deployment plans together.
In the case of working with XL Deploy, you are not going to write as many scripts. The process has more to do with understanding what you want and then it actually generates the deployment plan and the automation that is needed for the application deployment.
It's a highly scalable solution. It's a bit different from a lot of the other tools in the market. Other tools are more workflow-based and this is a model-based deployment automation engine. It works across all major application platforms, container platforms and cloud platforms. We find it to be a very good fit for what we need to accomplish and it's very easy to manage and to maintain it from an enterprise skill perspective, as well.
I think the model-based automation itself is a marked differentiator that sets this product apart from anything else on the market. Secondly, It is also agent-less which is what we prefer as compared to an agent-based approach which increases the maintainance overhead
These are two key contributing factors to describing our primary use case.
For our organization, the speed of deployment is paramount. The speed at which we can deploy is enhanced by automation with this product and has been much faster than anything else we experimented with.
If you ever write a lot of deployment scripts and playbooks, et cetera, and you have to maintain all of this it becomes a burden. In this case, we didn't have to do as much of that maintenance. First of all, as an example, say somebody writes a script and he leaves your company in a year's time. Then somebody else looks at that script and the guy who wrote it came at it from a certain perspective and it may not be easy to interpret. It works for some cases, but in other cases, it isn't quite right. You don't exactly know what cases it was written for or what other scripts it had to be used with. There's lost knowledge of the purpose of the script because the person who wrote it is gone.
Instead, with XL Deploy this is scalable because you define your deployment package using your favourite CI tools, and you point it to a logical application-centric environment to which it needs to deployed. The rest of how it needs to get deployed and based your specified deployment pattern like blue-green, canary etc, the deployment plan is generated by XLDeploy and the application is deployed.
We don't really spend time building scripts and maintaining scripts as part of something someone has to remember any more. XL Deploy does that for us and the deployment knowledge does not get lost. So, you actually accelerate processes of deployment and automation is much faster than with other platforms.
We don't feel the learning curve for XL Deploy is very high. For the company, this means you don't necessarily need the same level of specialist skills for a successful deployment. It is much easier for people who are new to it to learn how to use it. That has become a big element for us pushing ahead, and it has made a serious impact on the way we apply scripts and deploy applications.
