Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

In December of 2014 VMware released version 1.0 of a new product named vRealize Code Stream. If you haven’t been following you may not be aware of what exactly it does and why you may be interested in checking it out. These days DevOps is all the buzz like the term cloud has been for the last few years. If your boss hasn’t come to you yet asking what your doing about DevOps, it’s sure to happen soon. You know the conversation. The one where your boss has heard about or read about this new technology called DevOps. Now you and I both know DevOps is not a technology, but more of a process or a partnership between Development and Operation. We are now faced with the scenario where there is so much buzz around DevOps that the majority doesn’t really know what it is, but they know they want it.

What does this have to do with vRealize Code Stream? Code Stream is a product designed to aid you on your journey to DevOps. It’s not an end all be all solution, but it aims to help you get there. VMware understands that many of you will need help in making this transformation and that’s where this product comes in. Code Stream is only a part of the solution, the other half of the solution is highly skilled consultants to help guide you on this transition. You may recall hearing about VMware acquiring a company named Momentum SI. Momentum SI is a consulting company with very skilled DevOps consultants. Why does all this matter? It matters because VMware is making an investment in not only providing you with solutions to help you automate your Continuous Integration needs, but skilled consultants that can help guide you along the way.

So how does Code Stream help you with Continuous Integration? It helps by proving a layer of automation and governance that doesn’t exist today requiring most organizations to resort to cobbled together scripts and tools to get the job done. This method is the lack of visibility when something fails. The lost time spend by development and operations troubleshooting when something breaks can amount to millions each year. Code Streams visibility will help you understand where the problem is so you can resolve it quickly and efficiently.

When a problem happens code stream draws your attention to the failed task so you can focus on where to start troubleshooting. If you look at the below image you can see that what pushing code changes to the staging environment something failed. You can also see exactly what was happening at the time of failure. In this case the needed artifact wasn’t available in staging and the dependency needed to be resolved.

When you resolve the problem you can see that Code Stream can progress you code through Testing, Staging, and right on to Production.

Code Stream includes integration to Git, Jenkins, vRa, and other popular tools in this space. It also includes an embedded instance of Artifactory, and not the open source version of Artifactory, but the full version with all features available. Over the next few weeks I will be walking you through how to use vRealize Code Stream and how it can help you automate your code release and continuous integration needs. I will start with some foundational information on Git, Jenkins, Artifactory and some of the other tools we will use and then dive into using Code Stream to tie them all together to create an automated pipeline release across Dev, test, QA, staging, and production.