Overview
The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care is publicly funded health system. Its plan for building a sustainable public health care system in Ontario is based on helping people stay healthy, delivering good care when people need it, and protecting the health system for future generations. The Ministry drives the overall strategic direction, in addition to monitoring and reporting on the performance of the health system.
They are also responsible for managing over a hundred different software applications with new changes being developed every day. The Ministry’s software deployment processes had to be fast and efficient while still being managed in a secure and auditable way.
Challenge
The Ministry runs a heterogeneous environment consisting of mainframes, Oracle and DB2 databases, DataPower web appliances, Solaris, Linux and Windows servers. Deployment to each of these environments was done in specific ways and deployments of applications that were resident on multiple platforms required a large amount of manual processing and inter-team communication. It could take a whole day to deploy a change to an application. The development team began shipping more changes often. This required an automated process to manage the changes with the application code, database schema, and configuration to the DataPower web appliances.
Solution
Having evaluated a number of different Application Release Automation tools, Ontario Ministry of Health decided to implement DeployHub Pro. The proprietary architecture enabled the application to be deployed to vanilla servers without the need to install or maintain agents at different end-points. DeployHub has a built-in SOAP client to rollback configuration changes to the DataPower appliances.
The Ministry wanted to implement the DataPower configuration changes first. To do this, the Ministry’s team built a series of actions using out of the box functionality:
- Backed up the original configuration.
- Checked out the new Jenkins configuration file (zip file) from GitHub.
- Encoded the configuration file into Base64.
- Sent the encoded configuration file to the Data Power appliance using SOAP protocol.
- Processed the SOAP reply, checking for errors.
- If an error occurred, the configuration was automatically restored to the initial backup.