Wind back the clock to the first days of Flexagon. We faced the dilemma of which platforms, technologies, and toolchain integrations to target. We quickly discovered that there are thousands, and no matter which ones we focused on we would leave some disappointed. The one constant is that the landscape is ever changing. Rather than boxing ourselves into a point and time view of the landscape, we took a different approach: Create an open, extensible architecture which allows customers to bridge to their tech stack and toolchain.
First and foremost, that means creating a first class DevOps platform. And very importantly, identifying the core use cases for software development and delivery, including toolchain integration, independent of the underlying tech or tool. On top of that foundation we can create plugins for specific platforms and technologies, and integrations to specific tools in each major toolchain category. With that philosophy in mind, we now have over 100 out of the box plugins and integrations. As the landscape changes with emerging products, we will continue to augment with out of the box plugins and integrations. If you are using less popular tools, or even homegrown solutions, this architecture enables you to plug and play just about any tech or tool into the DevOps solution.
Enterprise Applications
Flexagon has made a major investment in enterprise applications. These systems are large, complex, and have generally been left behind in the DevOps revolution. FlexDeploy has native out of the box support for major ecosystems: Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP. What underpins these solutions is what is called the FlexDeploy package-based model. At the core, this solution discovers an inventory of development artifacts from the source and places them into a File catalog. From there, the files can be assembled into packages, which can then be built and deployed across a pipeline. This provides the ability to more dynamically assemble the files which make up a feature or bug fix, and very importantly, track the status of each deployment down to the file level. The package-based model is open and extensible and therefore supports other enterprise applications.
Workflows & Plugins
Essential to our open and extensible philosophy is the upwards of a hundred out-of-the-box plugins available in FlexDeploy. Among the rich and comprehensive plugins for applications and middleware platforms, are lower-level plugins which are the building blocks to create your own custom workflows. Examples of this may include Unix Shell, Windows Shell, Python, Ant, Maven, and more. Want to build your own plugin which can be reused in your workflows? Or are you a partner who wants to make solutions available across your customer base? FlexDeploy’s plugin SDK allows you to create your own plugins which can be used the in the same way as the ones provided by Flexagon. That is, drag and drop your custom plugin operations to design your workflows, and configure required environment and project scoped properties to drive dynamic behavior.
What About My Toolchain?
FlexDeploy has integration frameworks for the major tool categories, and provides out of the box integrations for the most popular DevOps technologies and tools. The major tool categories along with examples of out of the box implementations include:
- Source Control Management: GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Subversion, TFS, and more
- Agile Planning: Jira, Azure Boards, GitHub Issues, GitLab Issues, and more
- Service Management: ServiceNow, Freshservice, and more
- Secrets Management: Hashicorp, CyberArk, Azure Key Vault, Thycotic, and more
- Test Automation: Postman, SoapUI, Junit, HP UFT, Tosca, and more
- SAST and DAST Security Scanning: Acunetix, Checkmarx, SonarQube, and more
- Collaboration and ChatOps: Slack, Teams
With FlexDeploy you can integrate with your preferred tools, as illustrated below using sample toolchains for Oracle and Salesforce enterprise platform systems.
FlexDeploy has an open and plug-n-play framework, enabling you to create your own integrations to your favorite tools. If you are not scared of a little Java or Groovy code, and the underlying tool has public APIs available, its easy to create your own integrations. And once you do, those integrations snap-in as seamlessly as those provided by FlexDeploy out of the box.
New to DevOps and Pipelines?
If you are new to DevOps, you can use FlexDeploy to automate your end-to-end continuous delivery pipelines, along with the toolchain integrations. If you are using Azure DevOps, GitHub, or GitLab to orchestrate your pipelines then you can utilize the comprehensive REST API to invoke the FlexDeploy build and deployments headless from your pipelines.
Incoming & Outgoing Webhooks
As if that is not enough, you also have the ability to drive integrations using Webhooks from modern tools. Send event payloads from your tools to FlexDeploy and create integrations to fuel your imagination and streamline your processes. Examples include driving continuous integration on a GitHub push event, or initiating the build and pipeline execution upon a status change in Jira. Conversely, send outbound messages to other tools when an event occurs in FlexDeploy. Examples include creating a ServiceNow Incident when a deployment fails, or updating a custom field on a Jira issue when a production deployment is successful. The possibilities are bound only by your imagination.
Conclusion
Flexagon aspires to be the DevOps platform of choice for a very diverse set of customers. No two customers are the same, with different platforms, technologies and toolchains. The diversity is achieved by providing out of the box solutions driven by market demand, and providing an open and extensible architecture which embraces that diversity.
See how the FlexDeploy DevOps platform can support your diverse toolchain. Request a demo today.
