Toolchain Integration

Delivery toolchains integrate a set of complementary task-specific tools to automate the deployment pipeline. There are many tools from different vendors that use different APIs within the release and deployment process.

Deployment Automation supports toolchain integration by providing a flexible, robust, and extensible plugin architecture. These plugins provide basic processing functions as well as integration with third-party tools. Deployment Automation ships with plugins for many common deployment processes, and others are readily available for a wide variety of tools, such as middleware tools, databases, servers, and other deployment targets.

Third-party tools exhibit wide and varied functions. Plugin integration is achieved by breaking down tool functions into simple, discrete steps that invoke a specific behavior. A plugin step might invoke a tool or invoke different functions in a tool, such as extracting or inserting some type of data.

When you use plugins to create a component process, you integrate and configure steps from multiple plugins. For example, you might create a process that includes two plugins. One acts as a source-control tool that deploys a component to a middleware server. The second configures a step that removes the component from the server. Together, these make up a component process.

A component process that contains a plugin step requires an agent. Unless the agent needs to interact with the host file system or system processes, the agent does not have to be on the same host as the target resource.

Deployment Automation helps you download and install numerous component plugins. New plugins are actively in development and continuously being added. The open, extensible plugin architecture means you can also develop and add your own plugins in any language.

You can find currently available plug-ins on the Micro Focus Services and Support download site. Select Deployment Automation from the menu, then log in for full information.

View all features ›