The document discusses the benefits of automation for various IT projects including middleware upgrades, migrating applications to less expensive platforms, building private clouds, upgrading core business applications, platform migrations, and rearchitecting IT infrastructures. It also summarizes a Maven plugin for RapidDeploy that allows it to use a Maven repository as an artifact store and download artifacts from Maven as part of deployment orchestration.

1. Compelling Events for Automation
• Middleware Upgrades It’s great when new vendors
bring out new features - but often taking advantage of
them takes a good deal of time and effort to upgrade
the new infrastructure - and introduces risk. Automating
the upgrade project speeds it up, reduces the risk and
builds a more manageable platform in the future.
• Migrating off ‘Premium Product’ With the economy
as it is, more organizations are forced to tighten their
belts, and one area that has come under particular
scrutiny is the annual cost of maintaining installed
software. Some organizations have made the decision
to move less business critical applications off more
expensive middleware onto open-source platforms
such as JBoss and Tomcat. This type of project is
accelerated when it’s automated and an automation
tool makes managing hybrid or heterogeneous
environments much easier.
• Building a PAAS or a private cloud With pressure
on businesses to deliver more innovation to their
customers, faster, we see many of our customers
building Platforms As A Service and private clouds.
These are a lot faster and quicker to set up using an
automation tool, and a lot quicker to manage demand
once they are up and running.
• Core business application upgrades or migrations
Many of our customers occasionally need to upgrade
or even replace their core business applications - often
complex, multi-layered, integrated systems that have
evolved over time and have many integration points
and are absolutely critical to the minute by minute
operations of the business. Using an automation tool
can reduce the risk and time associated with such
a project.
• Platform migrations Sometimes it’s time to move
from one platform to another - for instance, customers
sometimes feel that a UNIX based platform will
offer them performance advantages over an OS400
platform. But moving hundreds of middleware
applications might seem like a challenge too far -
without automation.
• Rearchitecting Change is a constant and businesses
need to continually evolve their IT infrastructure
and operations, build new environments for things
like Disaster Recovery and automating the build
and deployment of these new environments means
delivering them faster.
Maven Insights
• Implementing a DevOps process demands
integration through the toolchain and it’s
essential that your Application Release
Automation tool integrates with the development
tools and repositories your teams are using on a
daily basis.
RapidDeploy™ Plugin for Maven
RapidDeploy™ provides organizations with Application Release Automation capabilities
to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. There
is a range of plugins available to extend the core automation framework capabilities to
most available platforms and perform integrations throughout the DevOps toolchain.
This datasheet refers to the Maven plugin.
Plugins are downloaded through the Plugin Manager console in RapidDeploy™, or from the MidVision
website at www.midvision.com.
RapidDeploy™ToolchainPlugins

2. Maven Plugin Overview
This artifact plugin allows an external Maven repository
to be used as the RapidDeploy™ artifact store. By
default, RapidDeploy™ comes with a FileSystem
plugin that allows you to store deployable artifacts
on a filesystem local to the RapidDeploy™ Server.
This downloadable plugin allows you to use a Maven
repository to store and retrieve artifacts. RapidDeploy™
will create a local maven repository on the server(s) it
is running on and will download artifacts as required.
RapidDeploy™ can be set to upload new artifacts to
the repository if required. This plugin does not require
Maven to be installed on the RapidDeploy™ server.
The plugin supports authentication to remote maven
repositories and connections to the Maven repositories
via a proxy server.
A downloadFromMaven task is also included, that allows
remote jobs to download, directly to the remote server,
artifacts and optionally their dependencies from a maven
repository as part of a deployment orchestration. This
is useful where for example there is a requirement
to obtain some artifacts at a particular version prior
to performing some further action on them. In the
simplest case this might be downloading a jar file from a
repository using the downloadFromMavenTask and then
running it via a LocalScriptRunnerTask.
Maven Plugin Versions
The RapidDeploy™ Maven plugin supports Maven
version 2.x. and 3.x
RapidDeploy™ Plugins
The RapidDeploy™ plugins extend the functionality of
the core automation framework and are categorised in
the following way:
• Toolchain plugins enabling integration with Build
Engines, Artifact repositories and Source Control
Management tools
• Transport plugins enabling use of SSH and
Agent capability
• Target plugins enabling connectivity with broad
range of Middleware Applications and Databases
• Cloud plugins enabling connectivity to cloud providers
• Business Intelligence plugins to extend the
CAF including for example, enhanced comparison
functionality and additional reporting capabilities
Plugins ship with:
• A Library of commonly used tasks
• Wizards extensive help information
• Predefined automation library elements
www.midvision.com©MidVision2013.Allrightsreserved.RapidDeploy™ToolchainPlugins
Want this plugin? Getting hold of it’s easy - either:
1) Go to the Plugin Manager in your installation of RapidDeploy™ and pick your plugin from the list or
2) Go to www.midvision.com Support Downloads RapidDeploy Plugin Downloads and select your
plugin from there. If you have any problems, please call or email your MidVision Account Manager.
You must license your plugin separately - please speak to your MidVision Account Manager
or email sales@midvision.com. If you are an IBM Rational Automation Framework customer and
would like access to this plugin, please contact us at www.midvision.com.