At the beginning of November, we were present at Gartner Symposium ITXPO in Barcelona.

During this event, everything was discussed around DevOps and Bimodal IT, so it was Eddy Pauwels’ speaking slot ” Non-disruptive, Single-Tool Devops for Bimodal IT on all Platforms”, thanks to his session, the audience know how to increase the coordination between change, release, and configuration management across platforms, deliver release at-the-speed-of-business, and maintain instant end-to-end delivery insight, without ripping and replacing the core infrastructure tools you like or development methodologies the audience may need.

Do you want a copy of the presentation…? Please send an email to [email protected] and we will be able to provide you one copy of it.

The foundation of the configuration managed by Clarive for its delivery pipelines and changesets are stored in its powerful Configuration Database.

Environments and their resources are managed in the Clarive Configuration Database as graphs. Each resource is defined as a Configuration Item (CI). Configuration items belong to Classes (ie. TomcatInstance or a OracleDB classes), and each class may belong to one or more families, such as Database or Middleware families.

Relationships

CIs can be connected to one another through relationships. For instance, an application may depend on a certain DB CI instance when deploying, so there exists a relationship between both.

Here are a sample list of possible relationships among CIs:

  • A release (topic) may contain require certain infrastructure to be deployed
  • A changeset contains repository changes, such as Git revisions
  • An application (itself a CI) may depend on certain microservice CIs
  • A pipeline rule may depend on Variables (which are CIs)
  • Variables may have different values depending on which target Environment (another CI) the Variable is being invoked for.

Relationships are created by associating one entity with another, ie. adding a changeset to a release. Clarive also curates the relationships and removes them if one of the CIs is deleted or deprecated.

Visualizations

Relationships may be visualized with any one of the CI Graph representations. These representations may be opened on the fly as properties of a CI (or Topic).

Graphical visualization of the relationship between CIs in Clarive

Application and Service Configuration

Any Clarive Project, which is used to represent applications and services in a organization, can be modeled from available configuration templates using the project configuration editor:

Application models are stored in the Clarive graph database and can then be displayed using the same CI visualizations mentioned above.