The Sonic Deployment Manager (SDM) lets you model all aspects of deploying Sonic ESBs, and then testing them prior to roll-out. The goal of the new tool is providing a way to pre-package configurations so you don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel each time you add a new service bus, add a node to one, or conduct any form of federation of assets deployed across multiple ESBs.
Additionally, the tool allows you to rollback and reconfigure all the settings at any point during the deployment cycle. This feature could be useful under several scenarios. For instance, if a test reveals some unpleasant surprises, you could roll back to the last successful configuration. Alternatively, if you are trying to document the state of an ESB environment for compliance purposes, the rollback feature can document the previous and as-is configuration, and provide a history of the changes.
The big change was that, as deployments grew larger, the scope of complexity got to the point where built-in tools did not scale, noted Hub Vandervoort, CTO for the Sonic product unit of Progress. He characterized these larger, more federated environments as matrices, where you had to superimpose requirements from different environments, whenever you started to federate two or more ESBs. Building repeatable development patterns was beyond the scope of existing tooling, he said.
The new SDM tool grew out of Progress/Sonic customer engagements, and previously had been available as custom developed tooling that was created through the professional services group. It provided a couple approaches to making sense of the matrixed requirements of federated environments.
First, you develop a rules base which acts as something of a lowest common denominator, so that when two or more environments are linked, the more restrictive policy prevails. The resulting rules base was also abstracted form the physical environment, so the rules were not associated with any physical implementation of server or software.
Although Progress/Sonic has developed the technology from customer engagements over several years, the company is now getting around to formally packaging it as a product. As part of the process, it has developed a slicker Web 2.0-style UI to make the tool friendlier.
Given that the tool has had a fairly long gestation period, the company considers it to be pretty feature complete, in spite of the fact that officially, it is a 1.0 version.
Progress/Sonic SDM is available now as an Eclipse plug-in.
