I had the privilege to learn and work on some of the DevOps tools like Jenkins & GoCD when I came across FlexDeploy which seems to be perfect based upon my area of work. It supports each component of DevOps loop.
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| DevOps continuous loop |
Today’s post will highlight some of the features & attributes on the same. FlexDeploy is a product born out of a startup Flexagon few years back and picked up lot of eyes especially in Oracle space. FlexDeploy offers several plugins associating itself with almost every Oracle product and alleviates pain areas in CI/CD horizon. You can easily build and deploy artifacts across environments based upon your technology of choice. For the interest of the blog, I’ll stick to only Oracle BI domain.
I have explored specifically the ODI, OBIEE & Oracle DB Plugin. I’ll write each in briefly but before let me explain how FlexDeploy talks with each environment viz. Development, Testing, Production etc.
FlexDeploy uses ssh connectivity with each environment – it puts the project specific binaries in that environment and executes them within, whether the task is to export the artifacts or to deploy them. Below diagram shows more in depth architecture:
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| FlexDeploy Architecture |
ODI
ODI plugin within FlexDeploy exports the scenarios from one environment (generally build env i.e. Dev, Test) and imports them into your environment of choice (Test, Prod). It supports both ODI 11g & 12c and uses marker & regex based approach to filter out the scenarios that needs to be exported. Once exported in the artifact directory (of course, you can push them to VCS repositories as well viz. SVN, GIT) these can then be imported in the target systems just by using ssh connection.
Bonus point: I have extended this plugin to support generating of data lineage along with several bug fixes. You can request your copy from the comments section below.
OBIEE
OBIEE plugin is interesting in terms that it supports partial deployments. You can migrate all the webcatalog objects or you have a choice to select and migrate only few. It supports RPD migration as well which supports changing of connection pools programmatically based upon the target instance. After deployment, it may restart the OBIEE services for you. Again it is well suited for both OBIEE 11g & 12c.
Oracle DB
Oracle DB plugin is richer in terms of functionality and support. It creates the baseline of your database in each environment and compares that baseline for any discrepancies in metadata. You can synchronize these environments on the go or schedule them.
The above information highlights the tool capabilities succinctly and more information can be found from here.
If you have any questions pertaining to the tool, I’ll be happy to answer.
