Bantotal DevOps is here One of the great initiatives this year for Clarive is the new Bantotal-Clarive integration packaged into a ready-to-use solution and distributed directly through the new and exciting BDevelopers marketplace. We’ve worked closely with DLYA, our partner and the vendor behind Bantotal, to create a comprehensive offering for Bantotal clients and prospects for setting-up a delivery toolchain on top of their Bantotal implementations. Clarive can be the perfect solution for you if: You and your organization would like to create a continuous delivery process around and for your Bantotal customizations and vendor packages and patches (called “zero deliveries”). Coordinate other DevOps pipelines already in place for non-Bantotal systems, but that need to be orchestrated with the rest of your banking core. DevOps is key for making financial systems changes flow at faster speeds without sacrificing quality. The Bantotal platform can greatly benefit from launching DevOps initiatives. managing and deploying to QA and preproduction environments deploy and rollbacking out of production environments orchestrating the deployment of dependent systems making banking core and mission critical changes predictable and repeatable promoting a culture of safer changes and feedback loops withing the teams that work around Bantotal Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us or with the Bantotal team. For more information, please read our Bantotal solution brief.
A Guide to Orchestrating Endevor from Clarive The Endevor plugin for Clarive Enterprise Delivery 7.4 has just been updated and we wanted to share with you how easy it is to orchestrate mainframe changes from Clarive as part of a enterprise-wide DevOps strategy. The idea is to give our current and prospect users a general idea of how the Clarive-Endevor integration works. For context, Broadcom (CA) Endevor is a popular mainframe configuration management tool for versioning and promoting changes across the different mainframe environments or “stages”, building and deploying changes along the way. Steps to be performed on the Mainframe First we need to make a change on the mainframe, so we’ll change a Cobol source file (“element”). We’ll make the change to the element from within Endevor, then we will create an Endevor package to hold that change and move it through different stages. Step Screenshot Modify elements/programs in Endevor/TSO. Retrieve elements to be modified. Modifying the element Add/Update element into Endevor Put new element versions into an Endevor package. First we create a package Prepare the MOVE the modified elements Build the package actions to MOVE the modified elements Cast package Finish casting package Now, instead of moving the package using Endevor, we will orchestrate it’s promotion to production using Clarive. Steps in Clarive Once the Endevor package that contains the element is “cast”, it’s ready to be picked up by Clarive. The package will be included in a Clarive changeset, which is the closest equivalent of a package in Endevor. Clarive changesets can be deployed to production standalone or promoted there within a release. In this example we’ll not use a release, but instead just promote the changeset all the way to production using a Clarive pipeline. Step Screenshot Adapt your pipeline to be able to execute Endevor actions Create changeset/package Select the Endevor package to attach as revision Endevor package now show as a revision attached to the Clarive changeset Endevor package contents are available from revision (by clicking on the package name) Detailed element version information is available too Promote the changeset to the next stage (depending on you Endevor configuration) View the job execution in realtime Clarive tracks the corresponding mainframe job spool and return codes Back in Endevor, elements have been MOVED Now promote the changeset to the Production in Clarive View the pipeline job being executed in Clarive Track the job output directly in Clarive The Clarive changeset will reflect the package status in Endevor The changeset is in sync with the environments/stages where they were deployed to Endevor elements can be tracked and viewed in Clarive with realtime data Back in Endevor, the elements are in production. Voilà! By delivering software changes with Clarive changesets, Endevor packages can be orchestrated as part of a much larger DevOps continuous delivery practice, integrated with other tools and co-deployed with other systems, ie. based on Java or other non-mainframe languages, platforms and technologies. Driving mainframe changes from Clarive is a key factor for building a consistent, safe and reliable application delivery pipeline that embraces the whole enterprise. Happy DevOps to you all!
Clarive 7 went through a complete UI/UX revamp Since last summer we’ve embarked on a complete revamp of our user interface and experience. The main drive to improve UI and UX was to make Clarive easier for new users. We’ve realized, after some careful user research, that only advanced users were using the interface with fluidity. They would navigate it’s internal tabs and easily find the information to build releases and deploy changes. Most users however had slower reaction times and took a long time to find information located in our application menus, in special when working outside the main flow they were used to. It was time for a revamp. User research As our team went through a Google Residency, we’ve amped up our game when it comes to Interface research. Applying the Design Sprint philosophy helped us improve our UI design process. After a few good design sprints = great UI/UX Project-based interface One of the most notable features of Clarive is it’s multi-application, multi-project navigation. Most Dev and Ops tools have a project/application/repository selector as a starting point. We were always concerned about giving our release managers a way to drive their releases across many applications. But most day-to-day users, mostly developers, work on one project or application at a time. We were forcing them to gaze through lots of information that were not in the right place to start with. The Clarive UI now always has a project in context Clarive is now both single project (see the project selector) and multi-project thanks to the Explore selector. We are working on two more views, first on the user-mode views, where the user will see all of their project data that pertains to them, and the project group view later, which will be a single mode project scope. Oh tabs! One of the most noticiable things we got rid of are the built in tabbed interface. This feature has been part of Clarive since its inception and early versions that ran on IE6 and it was a tough call to make. The old tabbed interface in Clarive has been gone for a while The reason we had a tabbed interface was that our users needed to deal with a lot of information and, if you recall from a long time ago (Microsoft) browsers did not have tabs in them. We’ve dropped IE6 support a long time ago, but the tabbed interface persisted… until recently. Clarive is now browser-tab optimized, as we dropped our old single-app tabbed interface Some of our power users will miss having tabs, but to be honest we ourselves were annoyed by how the interface would become very busy very quickly, difficult to find your way around and non-standard as URLs did not correspond to the UI state at a given point in time. React to this The new interface is slick! We’ve migrated the layout and most of our UI components to React. It’s been a fun and rewarding process. We tried Vue.js component interface first, which was good, but we just found React components and JS-focused architecture and style was more familiar to the team. The statuses admin UI has the new, reactified look We are used to building visual components straight in Javascript, and JSX seemed like a more natural and intuitive fit. We are also in love with Ant Design’s library of components that were ready to use and easy to style. Pubsub and logging streams With our revamped pubsub server, UI push updates happen on the fly and make the interface even more reactive. So no need for autorefresh anymore. We’ve also took the opportunity to reformat and restyle the log output stream, with terminal ANSI colors and push updates. Job streaming with push updates and ANSI terminal colors The Topic Grid The topic grid, also known as a topic list or table, has been completely redone in the just released version 7.4.0. We cover that in another blog post, but that also has been an exercise in interface design. Topics can now be filtered in queried in new ways We’ve also improved topic querying and filtering, with new revamped filters that are also reflected into the URL as query parameters. That way you can just use your browser bookmarks as a replacement for the deprecated favorites. Admin users and roles We’re still in the process of updating some of our admin interfaces, but for now the most significant changes come in the Admin users and role/action configuration. User administration also went through a good usability review Shields We also wanted to give our users more standard visual cues for the status of a release or changeset build, testing and deploy. For that we’ve picked https://shields.io/ as the reference implementation and now it looks like this: Shields now give users indications on the status of build, test and deploying It should make it much easier for our users to get a feeling of how their changeset is progressing through the delivery lifecycle. Deprecation: Favorites Besided dropping our tabbed our tabbed interface in favor of single page design, we’ve removed the Favorites section, since now you can use the browser favorites instead. Favorites were a slapped on fix to the old tabbed system, since tabs did not have cannonical URLs most of the time. More to come Watch for more UI revamps, as we’re looking now into these interfaces for the upcoming 7.6 series: Job monitoring and job dashboard Release planning redo Inline topic editing (without a separate window) Report designer The above should be available later during this year. In the roadmap for next year, most likely the 7.8 series, there will be a rule designed revamp, as we’re implementing project-based rules inspired on our YAML rulebooks (which are already project based). That’s all for now, I hope you enjoy working with our new UI as much as we do.