With evolving user requirements, many IT firm organisations struggled with the continuous release of their applications. To address this struggle, various release management tools were introduced in the IT market to simplify and streamline the process.
Why Do You Need A Robust Release Management Plan?
You can define your release process as phases in a deployment pipeline with a release plan. Each phase involves sequential steps that need to be executed before the next initiates.
Segmentation and grouping of these release stages are done using approval gates so that QA and release managers can determine whether an artifact is ready for the next phase in the release pipeline or not. This entire release management process (including all the phases) needs comprehensive tracking for reporting purposes.
Such stringent processes aim to ensure that only reliable and high-quality applications are deployed into production, and the updates are available to the users on time.
All these processes need to be carried out smoothly and accurately to prevent any glitches in the application, and that’s where the release tools come in.
So, which tool is ideal for your organisation? Which IT management tool can generate the maximum ROI from your deployment processes?
Let’s find out!
In this article, we’ve enlisted the top 5 IT management tools that can help you streamline your release management process.
Top 5 Release Management Tools
Ansible offers a very simple approach to deploy your application through Ansible “playbooks”. You can reliably and continually deploy multi-tier applications, all from a single centralised framework.
It enables you to configure the required services and push application artifacts from that centralised system.
With Ansible “playbook”, your team doesn’t need to work on lengthy codes for automating your systems. Instead, your team can create simple task descriptions that even your newest team member can comprehend on the first read. This saves both time and financial expenditure.
Docker constitutes an open-source project that offers you a platform for developing and shipping applications through containers. This platform allows your development team to easily create standardised IT environments for ensuring close replication of the test and production environment.
This IT management tool also provides a lightweight solution for virtualizing your applications, thus reducing memory requirements when compared to traditional virtualisation technologies.
Jenkins is one of the leading open-source automation servers, offering hundreds of plugins to support developing, automating and deploying your applications.
The simple set-up and configuration feature allows easy integration of practically any IT tool across multiple machines. It can even support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Octopus Deploy was specifically designed to automate deployment for .NET applications. With an easy and quick installation feature, you get the liberty to choose installation on a server or an Azure instance.
Additionally, it offers a secured release of your .NET applications into different IT environments- Testing, Staging, UAT or Production environments and on-premise or cloud environments.
IBM UrbanCode is an application release automation tool in the DevOps space. It offers you the combined benefit of visibility, traceability and auditing.
With the IBM release tool, you can deploy seamlessly to distributed data centres, cloud-based platforms and virtual environments based on a specified schedule or as frequently as required.
It also automates both on-premise and cloud environment deployment.
Conclusion
Using the correct release management tools and right integration partner, you can not just deliver high-quality software to the end-users but also improve your brand value in the market and ROI. Start your tool integrations today!
