Automation of deployments helps in speeding up the deployments ánd at the same time reduces time spent by Developers/Operators on these mundane and repeating tasks. It's great that tremendous effort is put into the SF Creation screens in the latest Thinkwise Platform releases (2021.3 / 2022.1). It's also great to see that the same is planned for Hotfixes.
Now, this Idea is about the runtime components of the Thinkwise Platform (GUI's/Indicium). Currently we are notified of new Releases via the Community News & Updates blogs. By subscribing to this Category, we receive an e-mail when the Release Notes are published (and the release is available for download). After that we need to go to TCP ourselves, download new versions through the annoying download task, and then upload them in our own environment for further processing.
We have automated deployments on our side already for Indicium & Universal (we only use the Windows GUI for the SF): after the new versions are uploaded in our environment, we can simply provide the Indicium + Universal combination we need, the target Environment (DEV/TEST/PROD) and our automation (in AWS using S3 / SNS / Lambda) takes care of creating the ZIP files with custom configuration, and Uploading and Deploying them (in our case to AWS Elastic Beanstalk).
The next big step to speed up this process is replacing the Community e-mail / TCP manual download / upload actions. Instead we would like to see the following:
- Thinkwise sends a Notification through an API endpoint (to which any customer can subscribe) whenever a new version of a runtime component is available
- Thinkwise provides a Download API from which we can then download the new version
