Accelerating DevOps with a Frog in a Sandbox

Here at JFrog, we say “Release Fast or Die,” but this doesn’t apply only to us; it goes for all enterprises who are facing intense pressure to become more agile and reduce costs. One way to do this is by moving to DevOps and taking an automated “as-a-service” approach to delivering infrastructure and applications. However, manual processes, infrastructure and increasing application complexity pose enormous challenges in accelerating application release pipelines when moving to the cloud. It is getting more and more difficult to automate the deployment of production-like environments complete with test tools, service and data virtualization and third-party services.

JFrog has partnered with Quali to enable a smooth transition of services to the cloud. Quali’s cloud management platform gives development teams on-demand, self-service access to blueprints  that include physical and virtual cloud resources making it easy to automate the deployment of  application and infrastructure environments on the cloud.

Quali has integrated JFrog Artifactory into their CloudShell cloud sandboxing software so you can retrieve and install artifacts on a virtual machine deployed on a CloudShell sandbox.

How does it work?

When you deploy an app into a CloudShell sandbox, you pass the sandbox the application’s artifact build number as an input parameter.  The CloudShell execution servers then get the artifact from Artifactory using the REST API and make a local copy. The execution servers communicate to the target VM server(i.e., the deployed CloudShell App) using SSH and copies the bits over. Finally, the application is installed on the target server. This is how it looks on CloudShell’s modeling canvas.

From Build to Cloud

Integrating Artifactory into CloudShell provides a fully automated, end-to-end workflow from the creation of a new build artifact to deploying the corresponding application on a newly created VM in a CloudShell sandbox. The rapid transition from an on-prem build to a cloud installation provides the agility and increased velocity that is core to the DevOps process, and ensures that applications are deployed into production-like environments.

Combining the highly scalable power of Artifactory for storing version-controlled binary artifacts with the orchestration and automation of CloudShell to deploy these artifacts along with their associated infrastructure brings speed and fidelity across pipelined environments, and fast-forwards enterprises to DevOps and rapid release cycles.

To learn more about Artifactory’s integration with Quali, listen to this webinar about leveraging cloud sandboxes with Jenkins, Artifactory and Ansible.