At XebiaLabs, www.xebialabs.com, we have recently been working on an exciting new integration for Deployit, our deployment automation product. We've created a Deployit plugin that allows you to deploy EAR files directly to virtual systems created by IBM's WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance (WCA).

But a small piece of background first. Deployit and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance both "deploy" things. But they deploy different things. Deployit deploys application artifacts and resources such as EAR files and data sources to middleware systems like WebSphere Application Server (but also HTML to web servers, MQ configuration to queue managers, etc.). The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance on the other hand, deploys patterns (topologies) of virtual images to hypervisors. But not just any kind of virtual images. It is especially geared towards deploying middleware topologies. In other words, the software Deployit wants to deploy to! This means that the functionalities of WCA and Deployit are a perfect fit; have WCA deploy the middleware systems and have Deployit deploy applications to those middleware systems.

In practice it works like this:

1. From the Deployit UI, The user select the application artifacts and resources he wants to deploy.
2. The user selects the WCA he wants to deploy to.
3. The user enters the name of the CloudBurst pattern to deploy and the cloud group in which to deploy it.
   
4. The user presses the "Deploy" button in Deployit to start the deployment.
5. Deployit starts the pattern deployment in WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.
   
6. When the pattern deployment is finished, Deployit reads the information about the newly created virtual system and the middleware on it.
7. And finally, Deployit installs the application on it, using the existing Deployit logic to deploy to WebSphere environments.
   

As you can see from the screenshots, Deployit and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance can be seamlessly integrated to give the user the ability to deploy his application to cloud environments without needing a lot of knowledge of cloud infrastructure and provisioning systems. This allows developers to set up new development environments from the Deployit self-service UI. It allows testers to set up their testing environments, often a bottleneck in enterprise development. And finally, it allows application deployers to deploy their applications to virtual environments.

By combining the strengths of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance and the Deployit product, the WCA value proposition can be extended across the IT organization and it allows enterprises to go form on-demand infrastructure to on-demand applications!