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Getting Started

Today's DevOps teams deliver large, distributed application systems. Teams work with hybrid platforms at remote locations and make simultaneous changes to a multitude of interrelated software, services and infrastructure. The only way to effectively track this complex, enterprise-wide delivery activity is with a comprehensive, repository-based, continuous change and configuration management (aka "continuous delivery") solution with highly scalable architecture. Manual methods, scripting and integration automation systems are not robust enough to help organizations improve the speed and quality of the delivery process and bolster service levels.

Clarive helps you synchronize deployment activities throughout the application delivery lifecycle on multiple platforms and across your enterprise. It also scales up to serve project teams working on your largest enterprise systems, and scales down to meet the needs of DevOps teams continuously working on deployment.

Through bi-directional integration with cloud and enterprise products, Clarive extends continuous delivery support to the rest of the organization, including not only cloud, microservices and mobile, but also closed products and the mainframe, providing unparalleled levels of delivery agility support for the enterprise.

The Purpose of this Guide

This guide introduces you to Clarive. By the time you have finished reading this guide, you will have an overview of the broad scope of the product and its usability will be familiar to you. It is important to us that you feel comfortable with Clarive before you begin to use it.

A Centralized Vantage Point

Production-oriented development environments focus on keeping existing applications operational. Typically, these environments include a constant flow of small changes to the production version. These changes are incorporated as they are completed, so that new features and information can be made available to users as soon as possible.

Clarive provides a centralized management point for streamlining and coordinating software change processes throughout your distributed environment by tracking and packaging application components.

By automating the introduction of changes, and streamlining their migration to production, Clarive protects your production application from contamination due to unwanted change. As a result, Clarive eliminates development crises and helps ensure a smooth transition between development lifecycle phases.

Construct your Own DevOps Process

Traditional continuous delivery tools make assumptions about how your organization works. They require programming resources for any modification. Clarive helps you create and modify models of your own development processes through simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop operations. It uses your model to keep software changes under control, keep schedules on track, and keep everyone up-to-date. By automating the workflow, Clarive also automates many routine application development tasks, including notifications and approvals.

Clarive includes a set of packaged lifecycle models with predefined phases and processes that map to common development environments. You can select an easily customized model to represent your environment, significantly reducing the time and effort usually required for implementing a continuous delivery solution.

Notification Eliminates Confusion

A simple setup procedure lets you select concurrent project development. Concurrent development prevents one developer from overwriting another developer’s changes. Clarive automatically isolates changes into separate sets. Participating developers can be notified automatically whenever concurrent development occurs. You can easily generate reports that summarize the changes, specify their time, date, and reason, and identify their originator.

You can also combine the changes of all concurrent activities with the integrated merge facility, viewing and resolving any conflicts among versions as necessary.

Manage Concurrent Releases

Clarive provides you with the tools you need to maintain multiple releases of the same application. The integrated merge facility enables you to automate the merging of some or all of those changes into a subsequent development process, eliminating labor-intensive manual merges. Both short and long-term projects can be developed in parallel, without inadvertently affecting one another.

All core functions of the product, both user and administrative, are available through a single, robust web interface. This facilitates quick, efficient navigation through your continuous delivery environment.

The Clarive interface combines ease-of-use and a familiar look and feel with the power to execute day-to-day configuration operations, making it easy for both new and experienced users to navigate through the product's features and functionality. In addition, a variety of other clients let you access and use Clarive functions.

Synchronize Enterprise DevOps Activities

For unparalleled levels of enterprise continuous delivery support, with dashboards, reports, automation and orchestration, all DevOps activities for the enterprise may be integrated into one place.

This means Clarive is a central management point for all release coordination, deployment and provisioning. Clarive helps ensure that application and service changes can be packaged, approved, and moved into production in many technology and application environments in a single transaction, and also helps ensure that projects are deployed only when all platforms are ready for production.

Distinctive Features

Clarive includes several features that distinguish it from other DevOps tools, and more specifically, Application Release Automation (ARA) products. This section summarizes many of the benefits and advantages that Clarive provides to you.

Scalable, Big-Data Architecture

The scalable architecture of Clarive enables users to take advantage of most continuous delivery functions externally from the user interface. This scalable architecture lets Users use Clarive as the focal point for implementing application delivery, executing systems-oriented functions, such as workflow automation, deployment, provisioning, impact analysis and discovery.

The scalable architecture of Clarive also enables easy access to continuous delivery information on an unprecedented scale. Clarive stores all control information in MongoDB, a NoSQL database designed for speed, schema flexibility and adaptability.

Adaptability

Clarive can be easily adapted to use your own development lifecycle processes through simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop operations. Clarive lifecycle models can easily be changed or updated as new process improvements are identified and approved. This adaptability keeps software changes under control, schedules on track, and your team up-to-date.

You will be able to define:

  • Document templates called Topics.
  • Workflows.
  • Form fields.
  • Transitions.
  • Environment-Status relationships.
  • Automation logic, known as Rules.

Orchestration

Clarive is designed to support many integration methods, including a first-rate set of out-of-the-box plugins.

These may include:

  • Creating webservices and webhooks.
  • Calling webservices.
  • Defining REST and SOAP interfaces and endpoints.
  • Bi-directional updates of data and state.

Security

Clarive controls access to administrative functions and protects sensitive data. Options are provided for the secure use of its web service interface and remote agent technology.

Clarive authenticates users. Clarive can control the execution of lifecycle processes and secure archived items managed in Clarive. Each process in the Clarive lifecycle can be uniquely defined, providing a flexible security model.

Usability

The Clarive user interface (the Clarive Workbench) is implemented using state-of-the-art GUI technology. It has been designed with ease of use and minimal training time as the primary criteria. Icons and toolbars are used throughout the interface, and keyboard accelerators are available for most common functions. Complete online help is also available.

Concurrent Release Support

The concurrent development feature of Clarive lets more than one developer work on the same area of code simultaneously without fear of overwriting another’s changes. Merge utilities are used to resolve any conflicts between versions.

Clarive makes it possible to maintain multiple releases of the same application. For example, you can work on emergency fixes for a release, while at the same time working on the next major version of that application. If necessary, changes made in the emergency area can be merged into the main application delivery cycle.

Change and Defect Orchestration

Clarive automatically tracks changes and testing defects in associated change packages and forms. Using the Form Details report, you can obtain current and historical information about one or more forms. Beneficially, your application production environment always provides a history of the delivery process, including specific changes and the reasons why they were made.