Automation Solutions for ATG-based Environments


If your business demands lead you to a platform as powerful and robust as ATG, odds are that those same demands have lead to complexity and scaling issues across the application lifecycle. DTO has the ATG operations expertise to help you solve those issues and bring efficiency and reliability to your organization.

What kind of ATG related problems does DTO solve?

Everyone's ATG environment and organizational issues will differ to some degree. Part of our service is to help you identify those problems and prioritize the solutions. Below are some of the common technical and business issues we've solved for our ATG-based clients.

Typical Technical Challenges Solved

  1. Promoting Code Updates and Catalog Data from Development to QA to Production
  2. Automated system configuration management so that you are deploying your ATG applications to a reliable platform
  3. Self-service deployment and management interfaces that enable safe and secure delegation to other team members
  4. Coordinating the build and deployment of various ATG and non-ATG components that comprise a release of your application
  5. Automating routine administrative actions that normally have to be done through the graphical ATG Control Center (ACC)
  6. An authoritative system that reveals the current state of affairs in your various environments
  7. Continuous Integration systems for ATG environments

Typical Business Challenges Solved

  1. Eliminating the process bottlenecks and deployment errors that can slow or break your business
  2. Shortening your “time to market” for rolling out both new applications and updates to existing applications
  3. Replace semi-manual and ad-hoc processes with reliable and maintainable automation built on well known best practices
  4. Enables your organization to be more efficient (and self-sufficient) while freeing up the time of your senior application and system experts

 

Solutions Designed to Achieve Fully Automated Provisioning

Our solutions are driven by the goal of achieving "fully automated provisioning". Fully automated provisioning means having the ability to deploy, update, and repair your complete application infrastructure -- from "bare-metal" provisioning to integrated application services to catalog updates -- using only pre-deļ¬ned automated procedures.

DTO's fully automated provisioning approach has been refined in some of the most demanding ATG customer environments. The result is an encapsulated set best practices and expertise that will not only save you time but improve the efficiency and reliability of your overall organization.

 

To read more about the fully automated provisioning approach, go here.

 

Automation Library for ATG Applications

Deployment and management of ATG applications poses a unique set of challenges due to ATG's complexity and notorious "quirks". DTO helps maintain an ATG-specific automation library that provides ATG developers and administrators pre-built service provisioning automation. This robust and flexible solution coordinates the build, deployment, configuration, and administrative procedures for an entire application stack -- from source code checkout through to managing a running service.

The ATG automation library is part of the fully open source ControlTier project and is available for free from the ControlTier project site.

Below is what a typical application release process would look like when automated using the ControlTier based ATG automation library. This solution gives you push button control (Web GUI or command line) over the entire application (code, data, content, etc.) and allows for easy to manage rollback, if necessary.

 

 

For more detailed information on the open source ATG automation library, go to the ATG section of the ControlTier project site or contact us.

For downloads and additional information on the ControlTier open source automation project, visit the ControlTier project site. For additional information on DTO's support and training offerings for ControlTier in general, go here.

 

Enterprise Features for Self-Service, Security, and Reporting

In addition to leveraging ControlTier’s enterprise strength automation framework and the deep expertise contained in ControlTier's ATG Automation Library, DTO's solutions for ATG management contain a wealth of other powerful features that would take considerable effort and expense to attempt to create using traditional scripting methods. All of these features are fully open source and available through the standard ControlTier distribution.

Jobcenter - JobCenter is a web interface for creating, scheduling and managing automation jobs. JobCenter provides an intuitive interface that allows you to safely delegate build, deployment, or other management tasks to anyone within your organization. They can quickly create one-off jobs to be executed immediately, stored jobs to be executed on-demand in the future, or scheduled jobs to be run periodically. As each job executes you can follow its progress live from any web browser.

Centralized Logging and Reporting - Out of the box, ControlTier provides activity reports to provide detailed analysis of who did what, when, and where. There are also built-in query tools that let you build custom reports or export model or log data to third party reporting systems. In day-to-day operations, the ControlTier system quickly becomes a definitive live source of process information, application inventory, and technical details for your developers and administrators.

Security - ControlTier has a built in role-based security model that enables you to have fine-grain control over who can do what with the system. This includes defining who has permission to create or edit automation, who has permission to execute automation, and who has permission to audit or review the automation and system activity. ControlTier's default configuration uses simple file-based authentication and authorization. For organizations that have an existing LDAP or Active Directory server and wish to manage user and role definitions there, the server and client software can be configured to use directory-based security. To help you handle sensitive information (such as database passwords) ControlTier has the built-in ability to encrypt settings throughout the system.

  

 

ATG Build and Deployment Operations Staffing

An ATG project will often require extra attention to the daily performance of build and deployment tasks during development and rollout. DTO can provide your team with expert build and deployment engineers that will become part of your team (either in person or over a VPN) and assume those duties for whatever duration needed. For more information, see our page on Operations Staffing or contact us.