ITIL V3 Application Release and Deployment Management
Release deployment and release management are disciplines governed by ITIL to protect production environments and the services provided by running applications. Deployment processes are carefully crafted to work in conjunction with ITIL Change and Configuration Management to ensure repeatable and reliable application rollouts and significant changes within environments.
Noteworthy benefits of ITIL Release and Deployment Management are well summarized by ITIL News.
- Increased success rate in the release of applications and improved quality of service delivered to the business.
- Consistency in the release processes of software environments.
- Minimize disruption of service to the business, via synchronization of releases within packages involving software components from different platforms and environments.
- Minimizes regression-testing requirements, offering greater coverage than possible with small changes that occur frequently.
- Improved expectation setting within an organization on publication of release schedule in advance.
- Error reduction via controlled release of software to the live environment.
- Audit trail of changes to the live environment is maintained for software distributions.
- Ability to absorb high rates of change to live systems, effectively and without adversely affecting IT service quality. Achieved by releasing large number of changes together as a single, controlled and well-understood release workflow.
- Reduced support costs through ability to maintain consistent software over a large number of locations.
- Reduced time to release with fewer or no delays.
- Smoother transitions of releases from development activities (projects) to final destination environment.
ITIL Release and Deployment Management mentions three kinds of application changes; Standard, Normal, and Emergency. Standard changes are low-risk changes that are pre-authorized. One of the examples in the ITIL literature is a "low-impact, routine application change to handle seasonal variation". Normal changes are those that go through the regular change management process, which starts with the creation of an RFC which is then reviewed, assessed, and then either authorized or rejected, and then (if authorized) planned and implemented. All these release types can be fully automated with Nolio Application Release Operations Suite for Zero Touch Deployment™.
Nolio Dashboard Provides ITIL V3 KPI Metrics
ITIL V3 Release and Deployment Management define a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Nolio Application Release Operations Suite and Nolio Application Release Operations Suite Dashboard provide simple on-demand metrics that surface these indicators for daily operations.
Quality
Eliminate errors, view successes, pinpoint weaknesses in deployment, maintenance & recovery
Release Time
Ramp up your time-to- release, 'make' your service window, measure, track & improve your agility
Cost
Dramatically reduce release costs & scale capacity to do more release processes, with less IT overhead
Manageability
Real-time insight into executions, dashboards, reports & permissions
to control who-what-where.
| Key Performance Indicator (KPI) | Definition |
|---|---|
| Number of Major Releases | Number of major Releases rolled out into the productive environment |
| Duration of Rollouts | Average duration of Rollouts from clearance until completion |
| Number of Release Back outs | Number of Releases that need to be reversed |
| Incidents Caused by New Releases | Number of incidents attributable to New Releases |
| Release Rollout Punctuality | Proportion of Releases finalized within the agreed schedule |
| Work Effort for Releases | Work effort for the Rollout of new Releases |
| Proportion of Automatic Release Distribution | Proportion of new Releases distributed automatically |
