Snow Commander's automated workflow engine and third-party integration capabilities are a strong asset to companies focusing on DevOps automation.
DevOps is a methodology of iterative software development that embraces close collaboration between contributing software developers, QA and IT operations staff. When fully embraced, there are many valuable attributes to this iterative style of development including (much) shorter release cycles, faster time to market, less intrusive upgrades, and higher quality.
But to be successful and efficient, DevOps automation requires the right tools throughout the software development lifecycle.
Snow Commander has a strong role to play here through automation, provisioning, approval gates and integration with configuration management tools (Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, making cloud management technology an integral piece of your DevOps pipeline.
The Commander catalog is populated with operating system master images coupled with Chef, Puppet or post-provisioning scripted workflows that install the latest version of application code for automated testing. These workflows can even be initially triggered automatically via CI events such as a Git commit.
Additionally, through integration with Jenkins servers, a full build of your latest code base can be built on a daily basis by executing a completion workflow via the Commander REST API to delete the current test virtual machine from the previous day, and submit a service request to deploy a new VM, and install the most recent build of your software on the new VM.
If you use Chef as your IT automation platform, you can seamlessly integrate Chef with Snow Commander to provision and manage Chef nodes. With Commander, you can predefine your Chef node configuration right in the service catalog.
When you integrate a Chef server or a Chef organization, Commander synchronizes with Chef to retrieve all of the configured roles, recipes and environments to be used during Commander self-service provisioning and workflows.
If you use Puppet Labs® Puppet to deliver ITaaS, you can seamlessly integrate Puppet with Snow vCommander to provision and manage Puppet nodes. With the Commander Cloud Management Platform (CMP), you can predefine your Puppet node configuration right in the service catalog. Requested VMs can be automatically deployed and configured as Puppet nodes.
