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.
Chef Insights
• If you’re a Chef user you’ll be used to picking
from the thousands of open-source recipes
available from OpsCode and by using
RapidDeploy™ you can run and manage the
environment configuration using our orchestration
engine. You can also export your tasks to Chef,
so users of Chef server can also take advantages
of tasks that exist in RapidDeploy™ and export
them as recipes.
RapidDeploy™ Plugin for Chef
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 Chef plugin.
Plugins are downloaded through the Plugin Manager console in RapidDeploy™, or from the MidVision
website at www.midvision.com.
RapidDeploy™CloudPlugins

2. Chef Plugin Overview
This plugin allows RapidDeploy™ to seamlessly
integrate with the OpsCode Chef DevOps tooling.
There are two options for the integration:
• Install Chef-Solo by orchestration and run recipes on
the target
• Create and upload your RapidDeploy™ orchestration
tasks as a recipe to Chef server.
Installing Chef-Solo and running recipes
on the target
RapidDeploy™ supports deployments via Chef Solo
Using RapidDeploy™ with Chef Server
Chef integration allows the framework server to integrate
with Chef server to package project environments as
recipes into a Chef cookbook for the project.
On the RapidDeploy™ Project panel,you can export
deployment resources to a cookbook. By using
the add/update cookbook button, you can upload
your cookbook to Chef server if Chef workstation is
installed. One cookbook will contain one project and
all its environments. For each environment there are
different recipes, which uses the proper environment
variables. The default recipe can be used without
environment settings (so therefore no environment
variables can be used).
When modifying a project or its environments, the
cookbook folder will be updated with the new settings.
The lib dependencies will exist in a separate cookbook,
which is a dependency to all other cookbooks.
Chef Plugin Versions
The RapidDeploy™ Chef plugin supports all recent
versions of OpsCode Chef
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
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.
www.midvision.com©MidVision2013.Allrightsreserved.RapidDeploy™CloudPlugins