Automate your development pipelines
As business cycles accelerate, companies need a faster way to get their latest ideas into production applications, regardless of whether they are running on premises or in the cloud. Such a method must provide an industrialized mechanism for application delivery and also reduce administration costs.
Ab Initio supports DevOps and CI/CD in the cloud, including the ability to automatically deploy an entire environment — complete with all libraries and other supporting software — to production on demand.
Ab Initio enables testing agility. The software makes it easy to capture, reuse, and update test data; author tests; automatically generate unit tests; and run tests in an automated way. Ab Initio technology enables you to determine whether you have testing logic for all of your data and use cases.
Ab Initio integrates with Jenkins to provide extensive test automation capabilities, including support for CI/CD.
With Ab Initio, because issues are identified sooner, they can be fixed earlier in the cycle. Development time is shortened, and revisions are easier and significantly faster. Projects are completed on time and on budget — organizations no longer suffer the opportunity costs of non-functional software.
Migrating decades of development from on premises to the cloud could involve years of work. Or it could be done with Ab Initio.
A major US credit card provider built one of the world’s most innovative Business Intelligence environments using Ab Initio software. After decades of on-premises software development and operations, they decided to take advantage of new technologies, eliminate local data centers, and move to the cloud.
Moving a system that had been developed over a span of 20 years is not an easy prospect. The data was stored in a very large, expensive data warehouse. There were over 100,000 lines of SQL, including vendor-specific SQL. There were thousands of Ab Initio graphs. They did not have detailed information on exactly which graphs were running, how often they ran, and which parameters they ran with. That information was buried in the job scheduling system and in the shell scripts that launched the jobs, and it needed to be unearthed before proceeding with the migration.
Because automation was the key to this migration effort, they worked with Ab Initio to build the automation machinery. In some cases, Ab Initio provided out-of-the-box automation tools and translators. In other cases, the two teams worked together to build custom automation tools. Automated translation of Ab Initio–based application logic is possible because of Ab Initio’s unique structure and metadata-driven processing model. Ab Initio’s analysis tools automatically documented the various job and data dependencies. Ab Initio–developed tools also analyzed hundreds of thousands of runtime log files.
This migration took 18 months, a remarkably short time for a project of this magnitude. Working with Ab Initio, the credit card provider ended up with a more resilient system capable of taking advantage of the latest technologies, and they saved millions of dollars.