vFabric Application Director

Enables deployment of a cloud based application through vFabric Application Director.  Your build can trigger the teardown and re provisioning of an end to end application environment or the release of your build to an existing Application Director managed environment.  

Table of Contents

Purpose

When leveraging vFabric Application Director to accelerate the consistent provisioning and / or deployment of your multi tiered application to infrastructure clouds, it is often necessary to automate and integrate the process with your Jenkins based jobs.  This plugin allows you to exercise a vFabric Application Director based application blueprint to achieve continuous provisioning or the deployment of your build artifacts to an existing vFabric Application Director managed application for continuous deployment or delivery.

Features

This plugin lets you automate the re-provisioning or release of your multi tiered application during a Jenkins build:

• Global Configuration
  • Base Application Director REST URI
  • Username and Password
  • Connection Validation 
• Job
  • Provisioning
    • Select from existing application blueprints
    • Select from existing deployment profiles
    • Schedules the teardown of the first existing deployment found for this application
    • Schedules the re-provisioning of the selected blueprint / deployment profile
  • Update
    • Select from list of existing deployments
    • Select from list of application components
    • Select from a list of update properties per component
    • Provide new value for a specific property.  Will typically point to the recently build application artifact  (ie. war file)
    • Update the selected existing deployment.  Application Director will maintain all update history.
• Application Director feedback provided to the job build console

Requirements

Jenkins

This plugin was tested against Jenkins ver. 1.466.

vFabric Application Director

This plugin was tested against vFabric Application Director 5.0.  The 1.0 version of the REST API was used   

 Application Director - Jenkins Integration Best Practices

• Continuous Provisioning
  • Create a single, dedicated deployment profile for any application blueprint you want to exercise.  Use a distinct name for the deployment profile such as "Continuous Provisioning."  Only use this deployment profile for use by your Jenkins job.  The Jenkins plugin will search for any existing deployment that match the application blueprint name and deployment profile name.  It will schedule a teardown for the first match that is found for scheduling the new deployment.  If there is no match, no teardown will be scheduled but he provisioning process will continue.
• Continuous Deployment / Delivery (Release Management)
  • Create a single, dedicated deployment profile for the deployment to be updated.  Use a distinct name for the deployment profile such as "Continuous Deployment."  Only use this deployment profile for use by your Jenkins job and ensure that a deployment exists before configuring you Jenkins job.  The Jenkins plugin will present a list of existing deployments for which to update.  If you have multiple deployment using the same deployment profile, it will be difficult to identify which deployment you intend to update.
• Build Artifacts
  • Your blueprint should be configured to download application artifacts from a Jenkins / Application Director common repository.  It is common practice to host application artifacts (ie jar, war, ear) in an artifact repository.  Your Jenkins build job should have access to upload built artifacts to this location.  Your Application Director virtual appliance should be able to download those artifacts.

Configuration

Global Configuration

Provide the base URI for your Application Director REST API and the credentials for a user with at least the ROLE_DEPLOYER role assigned.  Validate that the information entered is correct and that Jenkins can connect to Application Director by clicking the 'Validate Connection' button.

Job Configuration

Provisioning

Select the Application Director Client checkbox and choose 'Provision'.  Select the application blueprint and deployment profile fromt the list that is populated from Application Director.

Update

Select the 'Update' option and choose from a list of existing deployments.  Select the appropriate component property to update and provide a value to be used when updating.

Known issues

 View known issues...

Potential upcoming features

 View potential upcoming features...

• The ability to configure you Jenkins job to verify the SSL certificate presented by Application Director
• The option to have your Jenkins job poll Application Director until the completion of the scheduled Application Director actions.  

Source code

The latest source code can be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/jenkinsci/application-director-plugin

Version history

 View version history....

Version 1.3 (November 25, 2012)

• Changed the global configuration namespace to ensure uniqueness with other plugins

Version 1.2 (November 24, 2012)

• Initial Release