[Anthill-pro] Anthill3

[Maciej Zawadzki]

Curtis,

The AH3 architecture is made up of a central server and distributed
agents.  The central server runs the web-based user interface along with
many other services used within AH3 like: scheduling service, job
service, workflow service, etc.  The Agents are pretty dumb compared to
the central server but they do end up doing a lot of the work.
Basically, anything that happens during a build (or any other type of
Job) happens on an Agent.  That means, that the source code for your
project gets checked out by the Agent; the ANT script (or whatever kind
of scripts you have) get executed on the agent; any additional processes
that you want to run as part of your build all run on the Agents.  The
central server stores all the configuration data as well as all run data
from any jobs that are run on the system.  Builds are run as jobs.

Underneath, AH3 is basically a grid execution engine along with a
workflow engine.  The central server is the job scheduler and workflow
execution engine and the Agents are the Workers.

One of the differences between AHP and AH3 is that in AH3 the central
server does not do any of the builds itself, it requires at least one
agent.  So, when upgrading, you get the same level of functionality that
you're upgrading from.  If you have a single AHP license, you get a
license for an AH3 central server and one AH3 agent.  If you choose to
install the agent on the same machine as the central server, then you
will have essentially the exact same type of installation as with AHP.
Of course, you can choose to install the agent on another machine, in
which case one of the advantages is that the web user interface will not
slow down while the agent is running build jobs.

Anthill3 comes in two different editions -- Build Management Server
(BMS) and Application Lifecycle Management Server (ALMS).  Existing
licenses of AnthillPro are upgraded to the BMS at no charge (1 AHP
license = 1 AH3 central server + 1 AH3 agent + unlimited users) assuming
that you have a current maintenance contract.  The BMS has all the
capabilities of AnthillPro -- so by upgrading you are not going to loose
any functionality.  In fact there are a lot of expanded features in AH3
BMS beyond the feature set in AnthillPro.  Plus the platform is just
much better, more stable, and definitely more extensible (since you can
add agents).

ALMS is essentially an add-on product that extends the functionality of
Anthill3.  The ALMS feature set is huge.  In a nutshell it comes down to
supporting Living Builds, which allow you to run additional processes
(Workflows) on an existing Build.  This allows you to set up additional
process that may run integration tests, or functional test, or deploy
the build artifacts, or promote the build artifacts, or any other
process you want.  And then you can run these processes on existing
builds.  So, you no longer have to rebuild from source if you want to
run a release build -- you would just run the release process on the
build you want to release.  There is also support for server groups
which can model different environments such as DEV, QA, UAT, PROD, etc.
 So you can configure for example a deployment process and then run it
on the DEV group to deploy your build to the DEV environment.  Later you
may want to run the deploy process on the QA group, etc.  You can have
manual gates that require human approval to go to the next stage, and
much more.

Well, this email is getting pretty long as it is.  There is some info on
our site about the features in Anthill3 and the difference between BMS
and ALMS.  We are working on getting a new site live soon.  Feel free to
ask more questions.


Regards,

--Maciej




Curtis Yanko wrote:
> 
> All,
> 
> I need to put together a OOM of cost for us to implement an enterprise
> level build farm.
> 
> I do not, as of yet, understand the AHP3 architecture so any help would
> be appreciated. While I get the idea of a server what are agents? do
> they allow for remote machines to participate in the build farm?
> 
> What about user licenses? I find this a scary aspect of the new license.
> 
> As a AHP customer I see that we can upgrade to a AHP3 server with
> unlimited users and one agent. Does that translate into a two machine
> server farm? What do additional agents cost?
> 
> - Curtis Yanko
> United Health Technologies
> Mail Route: CT028-07SA
> Internet email: curt_yanko at uhc.com
> Office 860.702.9059
> Cell 860.729.8171
> 
> 
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