We are proud to announce the latest update to Serena Release Automation (SRA). Advancements have been made in several key areas:
- Ease of use
- Cloud ready
- High availability
- Self service
- Scalability
- Integration
You can read the press release for an overview of all of the new features in SRA (screenshot above). Here are three areas I am particularly excited about.
Ease of use
Ease of use is an area where application release automation solutions have been too complex. In this release, we have embarked on a UI refresh, starting with a task-based UI. The menu structure has been simplified and the UI doesn’t lose context when switching between tasks, which can be a significant time saver. There are also quick links to recently used application pages. The end result is a significant decrease in the ramp-up time for new SRA users.
High Availability
A differentiator in the world of Application Release Automation (ARA) is High Availability (HA). While HA has been common in other areas such as database servers, high availability has been lacking in ARA solutions, primarily because existing solutions have been focused on team level use cases. When embarking on an enterprise-wide application release automation initiative, availability of the SRA server is critical. Failure no longer affects deployments at a team level. If the application release automation server goes down in the enterprise, multiple complex deployments could be impacted.
With SRA the automation server can be configured in a cluster. This not only ensures that the server is always available but also that servers are hot swappable, which allows for in-place upgrades, further reducing downtime.
Security
We aligned security privileges with enterprise-class security standards. In contrast, competing ARA products require the use of elevated security privileges, like being required to run as root. Enterprise adoption will be even easier than before since security exceptions don’t have to be granted anymore.
Check out our September DevOps Drive-In webcast to learn about implementing continuous delivery with Serena Release Manager and to see Serena Release Manager and Serena Release Automation in action.
