News

CA Release Automation Now Integrated with JFrog Artifactory

• By John K. Waters
• May 6, 2015

CA Technologies has integrated its Release Automation solution with JFrog's Artifactory binary repository management system, the two companies announced. The move was motivated by CA customer demand for a repository offering high availability (HA), said David Cramer, vice president of CA's Application Delivery Product Management group.

"Our customers are delivering new applications and making changes to existing applications at a scale that was unimaginable just a few years ago," Cramer said in a statement. "The tools used in developing, testing and deploying these applications are mission critical and must be available at all times. By working together with leading companies like JFrog, we can help our customers implement continuous delivery at very high scale and win in the application economy."

CA Release Automation is an enterprise-class continuous delivery solution for automating and standardizing application deployments. It's designed to automate complex, multi-tier release deployments via orchestration and promotion of apps from development through production.

Artifactory, JFrog's flagship product, was one of the first cloud-based binary repository managers. It integrates with the open-source Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server, Atlassian's Bamboo CI, JetBrains' TeamCity build and CI server, the Gradle and Apache Maven project automation tools, and the NuGet package manager for .NET, among others. It is the only binary repository to offer HA, the company says.

"The binary repository is really the heart of the software delivery pipeline," Adam Frankl, JFrog's VP of marketing, told ADTmag, "which is why we've invested so heavily in HA. We're seeing a major change in the enterprise that's driven by DevOps, so if your binary repository goes down, not only does your development work stop, but also potentially your operations team stops. And minutes of downtime are a huge expense."

Binary repositories are also rapidly emerging as a critical part of the industry response to the new challenges of polyglot programming, explained 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman. This "best-tool-for-the-job" trend involves a much greater variety of application components (languages, frameworks, databases, messaging, Web servers, and so on) and infrastructures (bare metal servers, traditional datacenters, virtual environments, public, private and hybrid clouds, containers, and so on), he said.

"Organizations need to be able to empower their developers and lines of business to take advantage of polyglot programming," Lyman told ADTmag in an e-mail, which may mean a certain language on the back end for performance, scalability, or other reasons, and another framework on the front end for presentation or UI advantages. A big part of being able to support the greater variety of application components and infrastructure scenarios is proactive binary repository management that offers visibility into applications, dependencies, and process."