Delivery Automation

The past #

Let us shortly talk about how a software product (any sort of software product) makes its way into your enterprise. Do you receive a notice by your vendor, that a new software version or a patch for your software is available for download? Do you then proceed by downloading the software and start reading the release notes? Do you then install the software to a new directory and find out whether your existing configuration can be applied to the new version? If successful, will you then repeat the same process for all your supported environments such as INTEGRATION and TEST as well as the PROD?

Continuous Delivery #

If that sounds familiar, then your software provider still lives in the past. Nowadays, software is delivered through a pipeline, whether it is custom software or a software product. The purpose of a delivery pipeline is to automate the process of deploying your software product to its’ respective environment. In short, it gathers the previously built software product in form of a container from a software repository, then configures the container according to the respective environment configuration and finally deploys the container to the environment. All of this is fully automated. In the case of utmost automation, the software is updated with zero downtime.

Welcome to the new world #

With Keycloak, such automated software delivery is reality. By setting up an automated delivery pipeline at your enterprise, your individual Keycloak solution is automatically delivered to all your environments. The advantages are clear: new versions, patches, extensions, even individual custom extensions can be delivered to any environment within seconds where previously this could take weeks or even months! Additionally, all configurations for all environments are under version control. This guarantees a very high level of quality of the delivered artifact. Even strong auditing requirements are fulfilled this way. Welcome to the new world.