Open Source Automation Framework

The ControlTier System was designed from the ground up to give enterprises a better way to automate the build and deployment processes of their applications. As an advancement over traditional scripting techniques, ControlTier gives you the building blocks and tools you need to achieve new levels of maintainability, efficiency and reliability for your build and deployment efforts across your organization.

Figure 4. Automation Patterns Use Existing Scripts & Configuration Templates

The core of the ControlTier system is an object-oriented command execution framework. Commands are individual actions or sequences of actions, called workflows. Workflows are combined together to form larger workflows, ultimately culminating in a single procedure that will automate an end-to-end application lifecycle, from build on through to deployment.

Creating process automation is simplified by included sets of standard modules that provide discrete process building blocks that capture the main phases of the application life cycle, as well as, common management procedures. ControlTier provides pre-built building blocks for common build and deployment tasks as well as standard application lifecycles for different technology stacks. Commands provide standard interfaces to both common development tools (e.g. version control system, build tools, packaging facilities), as well as, interfaces to application platforms (e.g., application servers). Commands can also expose existing shell scripts (e.g. ant, perl, shell, windows batch) as components useable from workflows.

Management and Compliance Reporting

In this period of increased emphasis on IT governance and compliance reporting, visibility into your build and deployment processes as well as assurance of their reliability is essential.

Out of the box, ControlTier provides activity reports to provide detailed analysis of who did what, when, and where. There are also built-in query tools that let you build custom reports or export model or log data to third party reporting systems. In day-to-day operations, the ControlTier system quickly becomes a definitive live source of process information and technical details for your developers and administrators.

Cross Platform Automation

The ControlTier System has been deployed to a variety of cross platform environments and is tested on the common versions of Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Initially designed for deploying Java web applications, the ControlTier System fully supports building and deploying apps of all popular programming languages and utilizing a wide variety of packaging formats.

Read more about the open source tools that power our solutions.