UrbanCode Deploy Reviews

Plugin-based architecture.

It has provided a platform for traceability across the whole release cycle for more than 700 diverse applications.

• Licensing structure - pay per machine deployed to.
• Additional integrations with ALM solutions.
• Unclear why it doesn't support build automation, which is covered by a separate product.

3 months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No - scalability is handled via client relays which offload the server's work to proxies.

Good.

Good so far. Not a lot of history there.

Yes, we used Build Forge. It's a build tool that was being re-purposed for deploy and it was beginning to fail often.

Very straightforward. Command line prompts to install all components, and hook into enterpriseDB. Trial version will use its own Derby DB.

TBD. Have handled most of this in-house so far, but we have a service contract available. No info on expertise.

No specific numbers right now, but we're saving the deploy team, the infrastructure team, the help desk team, and the development teams many hours. Results are variable based on how much automation was already done, and the quality of the legacy code.

Evaluated Automic, CA product offerings. Also kept tabs on the Serena offering.

• Start with small wins to build momentum towards the larger applications.
• Align with the compliance team from the beginning. We had compliance and internal audit in the room for the PoC to run through concerns up front.

I've found that the most valuable feature is the Server/Agent architecture. In most cases, once you install the agent onto a machine, you rarely (if ever) need to log on to the agent machine itself to diagnose issues with most scripted deployment tasks.

Urbancode Deploy allowed us to implement a nearly-complete Continuous Delivery solution for one of our web applications - builds were deployed and promoted straight through from a development environment all the way to a Staging/UAT environment with little to no engineer interaction.

Upgrade & Migration from older versions, as well as Import & Export of application automation data between multiple environments has some room for improvement.

2.5 years.

Installation into a clean environment is easy and straightforward. Upgrading an existing Urbancode Deploy server is unfortunately quite tricky, as many of the migration scripts for the database need patching and fixes based on the specific customer install.

Only on a couple of very rare occasions, and IBM Tech Support was very responsive in all of those.

Yes, with this particular product it is important to heed the provided best practices for inventory management and server specs - the larger the installation footprint, the more quickly the internal database size and repository size will grow if not managed appropriately.

Their sales and licensing support seems adequate. I would encourage any potential customer to make sure they accurately forecast their licensing needs as the PO process seems to take weeks rather than days.

IBM's Technical support is fantastic when you are in a "down" state - unfortunately I feel it drops off quite quickly from there. If the application is not entirely non-functional, their capacity for working through functional issues does not seem very deep.

Yes, I have used FinalBuilder for deployment automation - which did not use a Server/Agent model or offer any sort of repository management or inventory tracking, which were the major selling points for Urbancode Deploy.

Initial setup in a clean environment is very straightforward.

In-house.

Urbancode Deploy allowed our group to go from managing deployment of two enterprise applications to fifteen, over the course of 18 months, with no increase in staffing or increase in system downtime. The number of deployments performed by our group increased exponentially and our deployment success rate went up by quite a bit.

Yes, we evaluated Thoughtworks GO and Nolio alongside this product.

Be sure to budget for/ accommodate a demo/dev/test environment for uDeploy as well as a production environment.

• Automatic detection of new builds (via an agent on Nexus).
• The ability to easily create a custom deployment workflow in the web interface.

Deployment to various environments can be done from a web interface without needing to manually copy files around or log into systems to run scripts.

Full blown support for repositories such a SonaType Nexus would be better than having to deploy an agent to watch particular filesystem paths.

We've been using IBM UrbanCode for 3 months.

No issues with deployment and the automatic deployment of agents and agent relay has proved very useful.

We have not encountered any issues with stability.

Currently a single node is sufficient for our needs, so scalability has not been an issue.

There was no need to contact customer service.

There was no need to contact technical support.

The previous solution was a mix of manually copying files around and logging into systems to run scripts. IBM UrbanCode Deploy enabled us to easily take builds from SonaType Nexus and deploy them into the environments without needing manual steps.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to install and configure IBM UrbanCode Deploy and remotely deploy its agents.

In-house.

Before chosing this product we also evaluated Midvision RapidDeploy, Thoughtworks Go and Xebia Labs XL Deploy.
Thoughtworks Go: the plugin to integrate with Sonatype Nexus is a thirdparty plugin and has been broken for sometime.
Xebia Labs XL Deploy: The set up of each app for deployment is overly complicated.